Tag Archives: Narcissism

Commentary

On women leaving marriages that don’t make them happy enough

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Don’t blame me! I didn’t write it. Alisha wrote it. She’s the meany, not me!

Excerpt:

I have a certain friend, a great guy I’ve known since I was a gawky teen, and who continues to be my friend in  my fully grown yet still gawky state. He has always been strong- fights hard, works hard, but loves the hardest.

When he married a few years ago, I was a little worried. Now that he’s divorced, I’m very hurt. And taken aback that he is not the only guy I know in this situation. In fact, I know about 4.

Now, these men are far from perfect. No one except God is. Yet in all these collapsed marriages, the women openly and willingly admitted the men they promised to be with until death had never hit, pushed, sexually or emotionally accosted them. They quite simply, no longer wanted to be married.

Of course, there is nothing really simple about dissolving one’s marriage, except for my simple-minded incomprehension as I sat at a showing of “The Devil Wears Prada” with one of these ladies a few years back. We had gone to the mall to do a little window shopping, and for what seemed to be the entire trip, this young lady- I’ll call her Amber- complained non-stop about what her husband wasn’t doing. He wasn’t buying her new clothes or shoes or taking her on vacations. She worked hard, many days 10 hours. And well, he worked, too, but it wasn’t fair he didn’t buy her more.

“Can he afford to buy you all that stuff?” I asked. She looked at me as if I were stupid. “MY FATHER works two even three jobs to make sure Mama gets everything she wants and deserves! Sometimes, he is away for weeks, working at construction sites to ensure it!”

[…]Another girl I know got hitched- only to ditch her groom before a tan line started to develop on her ring finger. The very same things she loved about him while they were dating- his commitment to God, desire to go into the ministry, his “good guy” sweetness- were instantly repulsive in marriage. Their marriage annulled, she jumped into a long term dating relationship which turned into cohabitation and a child together. But fortunate for her, no wedding.

I actually blame the men for choosing these women. Men have to test women during the courtship to see if what they are interested in is making a commitment and then acting self-sacrificially to honor their obligations. I could tell you nightmare stories about Christian women I know who can do the most amazing acts of selfishness and then totally refuse to make amends or accept any responsibility. But then, I’m not married to those women – because that all came out before I ever got serious about them. Many women are judging men today based on how amusing they are and whether their girlfriends will be envious and approving based on secular criteria supplied by TV shows and music videos. This all has to be detected during the courtship by the man. Courting is when the man has to detect if the woman is thinking anything other than “if I don’t like this – if it doesn’t make me feel happy all the time and impose no obligations on me – then I can get out of it”. Is she ready for a commitment? That’s the man’s job to find out.

What courtship is really about for men is communicating your plan and the challenges you’re facing and then standing back to see if she wants to help. I once met a Christian woman who would not so much as sit down with me to see what I did for a living. She wanted to have fun! And understanding my job so that she could help was not fun. (Presumably, spending my money that I earned from that job would have been more fun). So if a man marries a woman like that, then it is the man’s fault. If men are too stupid to know how to detect lemons then they deserve to suffer. Learning how to court is more important than playing video games. Knowing what laws strengthen men in their roles as husbands and fathers is more important than watching X-treme sports. Men are responsible to understand marriage, understand what women do in a marriage, and understand policies that strengthen or weaken marriage. Many men who are divorced today voted for the party of no-fault divorce (with the custody battles and fake charges of child abuse) and domestic violence laws (which criminalize criticizing your wife’s spending or weight) yesterday. And those men are fools. And they must be punished.

Men are terrible at knowing what they want from women. What matters to the stupid men about women today is not whether they are chaste and self-sacrificial and organized and goal-oriented, but only their physical appearance, how much they are willing to drink, and how far they are willing to go physically. Even Christian men have no idea what Christian women are supposed to DO in a marriage. Many men think that marriage will be 50% playing video games, and 50% sex or something. It’s just totally unrealistic. Not to mention that women are not inanimate objects. They are more like employees. If you bring a woman into your home and do not know how to motivate them, then they will not fill the role that they are assigned. Surely a wife is as entitled to as much “management” as an employee. Having sex with someone is not effective management. One-on-one eye-to-eye communication about current concerns and future goals is effective management.

I think that men and women really need to sit down and think about marriage and parenting as an engineering problem. What are the use cases? What are the requirements? What is the design plan? What are the possible solutions? What are the tradeoffs? What is the schedule? How much of this can we build ourselves, and how much of it can we purchase or outsource? If the woman is not on board with the seriousness of marriage, because she resents obligations, saving money and structure, then drop her like a hot potato. If she does not want a man to fulfill his roles in the marriage – protecting, providing and leading on moral/spiritual issues – then kick her to the curb. Spontaneity is good for a Sunday afternoon or a Friday night. It is not the way to run a a marriage, especially when there are kids. Spontaneity is not the way to produce quality software – with garbage in, you get garbage out. Can you imagine hiring an engineer based solely on their physical appearance and amusement value? Yet this is what men are doing. Christian men are doing this.

Commentary

Why are so many British feminists converting to Islam?

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Mary sent me this article a while back about a trend of conversions to Islam by women in the UK.

Here’s an example story:

Women like Kristiane Backer, 43, a London-based former MTV presenter who had led the kind of liberal Western-style life that I yearned for as a teenager, yet who turned her back on it and embraced Islam instead. Her reason? The ‘anything goes’ permissive society that I coveted had proved to be a superficial void.

The turning point for Kristiane came when she met and briefly dated the former Pakistani cricketer and Muslim Imran Khan in 1992 during the height of her career. He took her to Pakistan where she says she was immediately touched by spirituality and the warmth of the people.

Kristiane says: ‘Though our relationship didn’t last, I began to study the Muslim faith and eventually converted. Because of the nature of my job, I’d been out interviewing rock stars, travelling all over the world and following every trend, yet I’d felt empty inside. Now, at last, I had contentment because Islam had given me a purpose in life.’

‘In the West, we are stressed for super­ficial reasons, like what clothes to wear. In Islam, everyone looks to a higher goal. Everything is done to please God. It was a completely different value system.

‘Despite my lifestyle, I felt empty inside and realised how liberating it was to be a Muslim. To follow only one god makes life purer. You are not chasing every fad.

‘I grew up in Germany in a not very religious Protestant family. I drank and I partied, but I realised that we need to behave well now so we have a good after-life. We are responsible for our own actions.’

For a significant amount of women, their first contact with Islam comes from ­dating a Muslim boyfriend. Lynne Ali, 31, from Dagenham in Essex, freely admits to having been ‘a typical white hard-partying teenager’.

She says: ‘I would go out and get drunk with friends, wear tight and revealing clothing and date boys.

‘I also worked part-time as a DJ, so I was really into the club scene. I used to pray a bit as a Christian, but I used God as a sort of doctor, to fix things in my life. If anyone asked, I would’ve said that, generally, I was happy living life in the fast lane.’

But when she met her boyfriend, Zahid, at university, something dramatic happened.

She says: ‘His sister started talking to me about Islam, and it was as if ­everything in my life fitted into place. I think, underneath it all, I must have been searching for something, and I wasn’t feeling fulfilled by my hard-drinking party lifestyle.’

Why is this happening? Why are women in the West choosing Islam? Is it because Islam is tested and found to be true?

I have a hypothesis, but I am open to hearing other ideas. I think that what these women are looking for is not really truth, but community and a system of rules that they can follow in order to feel accepted by the community and to feel less guilty about the mistakes they made in the past. It’s not like they are undertaking some survey of religions and evaluating each one based on logical and evidential criteria. It’s not like they watched debates and listened to multiple sides in conflict. No. It’s that they partied a lot, then felt guilty, then picked a religion with rules about prayer and dress, (easy things they can show off and talk about), that would make their guilt go away. They turned over a new leaf and their new community-approved behavior is giving them acceptance and self-esteem. Truth has nothing to do with their search, and they don’t think that anyone else’s view is “false” either. They have no intention of arguing for their new convictions with other faith communities to see whose view is true. The point of their conversion is NOT to be RIGHT, it’s to FEEL GOOD about themselves after all the bad things they did. Religion is really on the same level as yoga, vegetarianism, recycling or pilades – it’s about subjective experience and feelings not about objective truth.

I identify this phenomenon primarily with women, but many men do it too. I would say something like 70% of women and 30% of men have this subjective approach to religion. This is why I complain about the “feminization” of Christianity. But Biblical Christianity is not feminized – it’s not postmodern, it’s not relativistic and it’s not universalist. We Christians should not want to appeal to the felt needs of people looking for community and self-esteem. We are a community based on truth, not a community based on feelings and needs and emotions. If religion is nothing but community and emotions, then there is nothing special about Jesus. He’s just one flavor – you can choose him if you like him, but if you don’t like him then you aren’t rationally obligated (by arguments and evidence) to choose him. I am appalled some people think of religion this way. It annoys me intensely. They are treating religion as the search for handbag or a new pair of shoes – shopping therapy to assuage guilty feelings.

When I see people choosing their religion like these women, it really causes me to wonder what is really going on in our churches. Is that all we are – a country club where people sing and feel a sense of belonging to a community and that some untested spirit in the sky is taking care of them? I know that the Bible doesn’t sanction a subjective approach to religion, but what if the church gets feminized and just dumps the Bible and focuses on creating tolerant welcoming communities and self-esteem building? Do we really believe that these moral rules are authoritative, and that they reflect God’s character and his design for us – our moral obligations? What if we minimize truth and sin and Hell and just give people a country club where people can discuss the weather, vacations and their kids’ extracurricular activities, and sing songs together, and assuage their guilt over their mispent youths. I am not saying that Christians have to be morally perfect – but maybe we would project seriousness about these matters if we were a little more informed and a little more self-sacrificial.

The question I have is – why don’t Christians make a bigger deal about the importance of truth so they can distinguish Christianity from other religions, and why don’t we do a better job of explaining our moral rules, (e.g. – chastity, pro-life, pro-marriage), with real logic and real evidence? Maybe if we made our Biblical criteria (truth) known, then people who choose Islam would realize that they were just jumping at religions based on their personal preferences, and neglecting to ask which one is true. Maybe then we would have something to offer other than nice buildings, “non-judgmental” (moral relativist) people, and good worship songs that make people have happy feelings. I know that people actually choose churches based on superficial things like whether they like the building or the songs. It makes me sick. It makes me sick to think that atheists are looking at us and thinking that we are all just irrational weaklings mouthing words that we have no reason to believe, and adopting rules in order to feel good about ourselves. Do people in the church have any idea how this looks to outsiders? They’re not stupid. They can tell authentic Christians from fakes.

Commentary

Is it wrong for women to complain about their husbands in public?

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DISCLAIMER: Women are allowed to complain about abuse, addiction, adultery and abandonment to their friends, and they are are justified in doing so. This post is about complaining about picking up socks and not fixing the sink.

According to Ginny at Ruth Blog, it is wrong. And I agree.

Excerpt:

Does this sound familiar?  “My husband drives me crazy!  How hard can it be to pick up a sock and put it in the laundry?  I mean, it’s not like he’s actually busy–he hasn’t fixed the leaky sink that I mentioned two months ago, or mowed the lawn, or cleaned up that mess in the garage.  And now that football has started, I never see him…”

I used to join in with this sort of talk. I considered it “casual complaining”–nothing serious, certainly. Sometimes I would even trot out my husband’s faults in an effort to sympathetically let a girlfriend know that her husband isn’t all that bad–all husbands “do stuff like that”. I hoped it would make her see that it really wasn’t worth complaining about. But that probably wasn’t the effect; my “complaining” ended up justifying her complaining.

Then something I heard (on the radio? at a seminar?) made me think about what I was doing to my husband.  It was terrible–taking private faults and making them public; taking small lapses and making them seem big; taking a man whom I love and respect, and denigrating him, belittling him. And worst of all, I was doing it where he couldn’t even defend himself. Just terrible.

So I stopped. It wasn’t too hard, if I caught myself starting to talk that way. The problem was that often times I wouldn’t even notice what I was doing until I was already well into it. Now it has been many years, and I believe it has really made a difference.  I found that changing my words changed my attitude; changing my attitude changed my actions; changing my actions changed his attitude; changing his attitude changed his actions. Win, win, win!!!

Wow, now that woman will have a husband who will love her to the ends of the Earth. And for good reason!

Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Laura’s book about the care and feeding of husbands:

“A good man is hard to find, not to keep.” That sentence should really make you stop and think. As a radio talk-show host/psychotherapist, I’ve got to tell you how remarkably true and sad it is that so many women struggle to hold on to some jerk, keep giving an abusive or philandering man yet another chance, have unprotected sex with some guy while barely knowing his last name, agree to shack up and risk making babies with some opportunist or loser, all in a pathetic version of a pursuit for love, but will resent the hell out of treating a decent, hardworking, caring husband with the thoughtfulness, attention, respect, and affection he needs to be content.

It boggles my mind.

What further puts me in boggle overdrive is how seemingly oblivious and insensitive many women are to how destructive they are being to their men and consequently to their marriages. Women will call me asking me if it’s alright to go off on extended vacations “without him” when they want some freedom or R&R, or if it’s okay to cut him off from sex because they’re annoyed about something or just too tired from their busy day, or if they really have to make him a dinner when he gets home from work because it’s just too tedious to plan meals, or if it’s okay to keep stuff from him (like family or financial issues) because his input is unnecessary, or if they’re really obligated to spend time with his family (in-laws or stepkids), or if they really have to show interest in his hobbies when they’re bored silly by them, or — well, you get the idea.

I spent the weekend listening to Dr. Laura’s “The Proper Caring and Feeding of Husbands” as well, so I am really positive about women in general right now. This book is the best book for women to read to know how to handle themselves around men. The fact that so many women bought it says a lot about women.

What are my thoughts? I really don’t think that women should say hurtful things about men who love them in public or even in private to other women. Yet so many (all?) of them seem to think that it is normal. But it really hurts men emotionally. Needing approval and encouragement from the woman he loves is the man’s biggest emotional need. I think men do a lot of things to protect, provide and lead that women just don’t appreciate – probably because they don’t understand how a man’s role really is.

I think that there are times when some women have a double-standard that allows them to complain and complain about men, but if they do anything wrong, they just shift the blame to someone else, (i.e. – men), usually by dredging up things that happened sometime around the Hadean era, when the Earth was still cooling. That is really unattractive and something men need to test for during courtship. Men should always ask women for help, always hold them accountable, and always give them responsibilities. See how seriously the woman takes her obligations to other people.

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