Tag Archives: Strong

Commentary

Men should prefer women who allow moral judging and spiritual leading

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I wanted to write about a common mistake that I see men making today when they are selecting women for marriage.

Some women prefer men who don’t have strong views on moral, spiritual, economic and political issues, and who don’t try to lead them in moral and spiritual areas. This is because if men know a lot about things then they tend to have definite opinions which might constitute grounds for rejecting the woman if she does something wrong, and women fear rejection. For the spiritual leadership, again, if the man has studied this a lot, then the woman fears that he will make her do a bunch of reading and debating which may not be much fun for her. So, some women avoid men like that. The question I want to ask in this post is – should men marry a woman who doesn’t like that they know a lot about moral issues and spiritual issues? I don’t think that men should, and I’m going to explain why.

Good men will want to set moral boundaries and lead spiritually when they have children.

Children usually look to Dad for guidance about the real world, because he is viewed as more “practical”. And fathers tend to want to protect children by setting moral boundaries and debating moral issues. Additionally, fathers want to protect children from believing lies that may cause them to make bad decisions. So, fathers are going to talk about things like chastity and oxytocin, as well as things like the big bang and the cosmic background radiation. They do this to tell children right and wrong with evidence and to tell children the truth about the world with evidence. What they do is NOT just state opinions or preferences – these are not take-it-or-leave it. And this can be offensive to some women who reject that morality is one way or the other, or that the universe is one way or the other. Some women elevate happiness above morality and truth, and men need to be aware that those women will not let them state moral principles or tell the truth about spiritual things. They value “compassion” (the denial of moral absolutes and personal responsibility) and “pluralism” (the denial that anyone’s beliefs about the world can be false). If a good man has children, he needs to be sure that the woman is not undermining all of his boundary-setting and truth-arguing at home. He has to test for this during the courtship.

Sometimes men are stupid, and choose women without regard to what God wants from the marriage.

Let’s pretend that men are choosing medicine instead of a wife. Some men are choosing their medicine based on the pretty packaging, and yummy taste, and then complaining when it doesn’t fix the illness. They want to choose a medicine without knowing anything about their illness and anything about the candidate medicines. They want to be “free” to choose a medicine based on the feelings they have about the medicine – not whether it will do the job required. They say: “But it looked good and tasted good! Medicines that look good and taste good should work!” They think that they can judge everything about a woman in her physical appearance and her manner. (Women do this too, when they talk about wanting things like “a deep voice” and “confidence” – without looking for signs that the man can meet marriage/parenting requirements). The purpose of the woman and the marriage, for some men, seems to be to meet their needs. So their criteria are the only criteria that matter. God is nowhere in the picture. He supposedly doesn’t want a marriage and children that honor him – oh no. He supposedly wants the man to be happy. The customer of the marriage is the man, not God.

And men really need to be on the alert to detect women who will block them from doing what good men do with marriage and children, otherwise they will not be allowed to make moral judgments and to lead the family. Men – make sure when you are choosing a wife that you choose someone who loves moral judgments and the way that you like to build other people up to be effective and influential. If the candidate resents your setting of moral boundaries, or resents your knowledge of issues, or resents your efforts to “bully” them into correct views using reasons and evidence, then you need to pass on that woman. You are a man. Men are interested in morality, truth, fixing problems and making things better. You must make sure your wife is supporting you in that role. Make sure she is choosing you for the right reasons, using the right criteria. You are a quarterback. Do not play for a team where you will be reduced to cheerleader and mascot. You were not designed to do that.

And women – it makes no sense to complain that men are not raising the children properly if you deliberately chose a man who didn’t believe in moral judgments or truth. If the man makes you behave morally in the courtship, he will make your children behave morally. If the man makes you believe true things in the courtship, he will make your children believe true things. You will just have to learn to like being judged on moral grounds and being led about spiritual things.

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News

What happens when the government pays people to have babies out-of-wedlock?

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Take a look at this article from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Britain’s most feckless father is having another five children  – and is apparently ‘engaged’ for the third time in three months.

Unemployed father-of-10 Keith Macdonald – who pays just £5 a week to support his offspring – will cost taxpayers more than £2 million by the time all his youngsters reach 18.

He has got two new girlfriends pregnant, is having another baby with an ex and a fourth woman who was already known to be having his child has discovered that she is actually having twins.

But it remains unclear whether the latest pregnancies will make Macdonald, from Washington, Tyne and Wear, a father-of-15. The 25-year-old has admitted he has only eight youngsters, while one of his former lovers has claimed he already has 11 children – so when the next five are born he would have 16 in total.

[…]By the time each of his 15 children are 18, they will have cost the state £50,000 in child tax credits, £20,000 in child benefit while each mother could receive £30,000 in income support and £50,000 in housing benefit.

He’s also spent time in prison and is currently unemployed. So where exactly is this guy getting the money to convince all these women of his ability to provide for them?

The father, who has met most of his conquests at bus stops, claims £68.95 per week in disability benefits because he has a bad back and £44 per week in income support.

He has previously said it was ‘not his fault’ he had fathered so many children.

[…]He fathered his first child when he was just 14.

What can these women possibly be thinking, having sex before marriage with such a beastly man?

He is now engaged to marry 32-year-old unemployed Amy Ward, from Chester-le-Street, Tyne and Wear, and she is expecting his child.

Unemployed Emma Kelly, 18, and 21-year-old ex-girlfriend Clare Bryant – have also both recently been made pregnant by the feckless father, it emerged today.

And another one of his expectant partners – 24-year-old Danielle Little – has just found out that she is expecting his twins.

It remained unclear when Macdonald, who has been in and out of prison, will tie the knot with his expectant fiancee Miss Ward.

[…]But Macdonald was also engaged to unemployed Danielle Little, from Sunderland, in September.

He had promised to marry 19-year-old beautician Sarah Armstrong from Chester-le-Street in the same month when he discovered she was pregnant.

Miss Little warned Miss Ward about the feckless father on Facebook – but she reacted with fury in a post on the site.

She wrote: ‘Some people just don’t get on with their own lives and just like to cause s*** for other people.’

I think everyone can see that this man is not the sort of man that would pass any father’s pre-dating interrogation. This man is scum. There was a time when a man like this would not have been able to afford bus fare if he didn’t have a job. But now the government is paying him so that he can carry on with women as if he actually had a job. They are enabling him to act like a child well past the time where he should have grown up.

The author of the post on RuthBlog asks this:

Questions for Your Consideration

  1. What is the womens’ role here? Are they victims? Why is the article centered around the man?
  2. Imagine what these kids’ reactions might be when they grow up and learn their dad is the father of many other children, most by different mothers. Do you think the parents considered the kids’ reactions before having sex? Generally speaking, are a child’s future (and unknown) reactions something parents ought to consider?
  3. In your opinion, is this the sort of future most women dream about when they’re young? What is the government’s role, if any, in supporting the dreams of its youth?

Those are good questions, but I have one of my own.

Husbands or government

When women think about marriage, do they think about where the money is going to come from to buy all of the things they dream about? I know that they dream about babies, weddings, clothes, shoes, jewelry, a home, home decorations, a garden, furniture, drapes, vacations, and so on. But my question is – are they dreaming about who is going to pay for all of that? And if they know about these costs, then why are young, unmarried women voting to increase government spending on welfare? The only way to pay for all these benefits is by raising taxes and confiscating their future husband’s earnings and investments. It may feel good to “soak the rich”, but does it result in more marriage-minded men? (Obama has greatly increased welfare benefits, thus undermining marriage and the need to choose a man who can earn money). How does heaping taxes and regulations on businesses make a man more likely to be employed? How does raising capital gains and dividends taxes make a man more able to earn a return on his investments?

A man cannot pay for all of these social programs, (which just incentivize more and more costly behaviors), at the same time as he is supporting a family of his own. If the government is handing out money to single mothers, then women do not need men to prove that they are good earners before having sex with them. So men stop trying to do well in school and get good jobs, and instead focus on being popular, exciting and entertaining.

The man in the Daily Mail article is an ex-con and unemployed. He is the worst sort of man for a woman to choose – and yet women are falling all over him. Because the government is making it unnecessary for them to care about whether he can earn a living and act responsibly. The government is saying “we pay the bills, so you can choose men on the basis of sex, drama and to impress your girlfriends with the drama”. Women have decided that there is no way that men ought to be – they certainly should not be respected as the protector and provider and moral/spiritual leader.

Ends and means

I have been struggling lately to understand why women spend so much time thinking about what they want, and complaining about their friends who are getting married, and yet spend so little time acquiring funding, skills and knowledge to achieve what they want. One woman I know who wants to get married recently gave a one-word review of “Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands”, which I made her read. Her review was “Barf!”. She has no idea what demands marriage will place on her, and resents the needs of men (and probably resents the needs of children too). However, she is very interested in Mark Driscoll and loves to load up obligations on men. Obligations on men = GOOD! Obligations on women = BARF! That’s how she thinks. It’s the feminist double-standard that Dr. Laura writes about in PCF Husbands. And, of course, if anything thing goes wrong with the intentions of women, they can just blame the man and claim that the failure was unpredictable and not their fault.

I once had a conversation with an unemployed Christian woman who was explaining to me how she had a right to collect welfare from the government in order to have a child out-of-wedlock by choice. She had NO IDEA what fatherlessness would do to a child, and NO IDEA how increased welfare spending caused higher taxes and reduced the number of men who could afford to marry. She was left-wing on most fiscal policies. (But she was also not a feminist and she was chaste, so not totally awful)

Contrast that woman with another Christian woman I know who did a B.S. and M.S. in engineering, worked 10 years, saved all her money, and helped her husband pay off their house, before becoming a stay-at-home mother. She wanted a husband and a home, so she went out and did two degrees in engineering so that she could help her husband pay for the things she wanted – before becoming a stay at home wife and mom. The engineer is vehemently opposed to big government, higher taxes and welfare because her husband’s salary is what is allowing her to be a good wife and mother, away from the stress of work.

Socialism and feminism

Why are women pursuing men like the unemployed ex-con? I actually wrote a post on why women prefer bad men, and why they would prefer not to have to deal with traditional men acting in traditional male roles. It’s less work for them if they just get a check in the mail – they don’t have to be respectful of a husband if a check just comes in the mail. Some women really resent the authority that a man has in the home as the primary earner, and they also resent having to respect men and deal with their other needs for sex, verbal encouragement, etc. They want government to replace men, because men, especially good men, are authoritarian and demanding and judgmental. And the result is skyrocketing rates of single motherhood. The out-of-wedlock birth rate is 40% in the United States, costing us 112 BILLION dollars a year.

Here is another post discussing research on the attitudes of college women to hooking up done by the University of Virginia. Women really are choosing this. No one is making them do it. They are doing it because they want to. The bounds of traditional sexual morality, traditional sex roles and traditional courtship  are not fun. Read the research and see for yourself what they say.

Socialism and Polygamy

This post on Haemet talks about the social costs of polygamy, which is another arrangement that can’t easily be sustained without government support.

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Commentary

Why do some women tolerate jerks as boyfriends?

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What causes Christian women to pass on strong, capable Christian men and to choose weaker non-Christian men instead?

Fears of rejection

On the one hand, most women want men to provide them with good things, to love them, to treat them honorably and to lead them. But on the other hand, they fear abandonment and rejection. Sometimes this fear of abandonment and rejection is so strong that it causes them to pass on men who they think are “too good for them”. A good man may seem unattainable to a woman who has not put in the same amount of effort to prepare for him.

Fear of moral obligations

Sometimes a really good man places moral and spiritual obligations on a Christian woman that require her to improve and grow, in order to help him with his life plan. Also, men flourish when a woman encourages him, recognizes him, supports him in his male roles. A good man who has definite ideas on what counts as good behavior may expect more from a woman, and those moral obligations can get in the way of her selfish pursuit of happiness.

Strong, good men are avoided

So it turns out that the fear of rejection or abandonment can be STRONGER when the man is good at his Biblical roles, because she feels like she doesn’t measure up and will have to work hard to keep him. And the expectation to fulfill moral obligations can be STRONGER when the man has a well-developed sense of morality, because he actually knows how women are supposed to act and he may hold the woman accountable.

Weak men are easier to blame and control

Let me explain some other reasons why a Christian woman might prefer to have a weaker, non-Christian man:

  1. A woman may prefer to blame a man in order to rationalize her selfish actions, and an immoral man is easier to blame.
  2. A woman may prefer to blame a man in order to punish him for some real or imagined crime, and an immoral man is easier to blame.
  3. A woman may want to avoid moral obligations to a man, and a weaker man is easier for her to control. (e.g. – using pre-marital sex in order to avoid having to love a man self-sacrificially)
  4. A woman may need to avoid being judged or led morally by a man, so she prefers a man who is weak at morality and moral reasoning.
  5. A woman may need to avoid being judged or led spiritually by a man, so she prefers a man who is weak at theology and apologetics.

So, it’s not that the poor, sweet, innocent women are helpless victims of nasty, evil, brutish man-beasts, at all. Far from it. Some of them DELIBERATELY CHOOSE to pass up the best Biblical Christian men, because they fear rejection or moral judgment or loss of control, and/or they want to avoid moral obligations to men that may interfere with their selfishness.

Disclaimer

I just want to reiterate before anyone freaks out that I know a LOT of Christian women who are heroic at letting Christianity influence their choice of romantic partners. Actually, I know women who are MORE courageous than I am in resisting bad partners. And it’s harder for a woman to do because women have concerns about the future, and so on. The choice to be faithful to God, to be chaste and to choose a godly man is nothing less than an act of incredible heroism. I wish more women did that. It is really amazing and admirable when women hold out for a good man, then answer his call to step up into the role that he needs her to play to help him with his plan to serve God effectively.

I actually know more of the good kind than the bad kind, especially since I started writing and the good ones just showed up! Pow! There you all are! Where had you all been hiding?