Loved by Strangers: A Testimony Done Right

In evangelicalism, we have a bit of a weird tradition. I've heard special speakers in church and read books that follow this pattern. Someone will share a testimony, the story of God's grace in their life, which goes into gory detail about their sinful and messed-up life prior to their encounter with Jesus, with greater and greater drama up to and through their conversion, and then pretty much finish up with, "And then I lived happily ever after."

This pattern has long seemed weird to me. It gives the strong impression that the most interesting and compelling part of anyone's life is the BC—Before Christ—part. It's hard not to get the idea that the listeners or readers are getting a vicarious thrill out of hearing the down-and-dirty parts of someone's life, and then get to feel okay about it as long as the message is that sin doesn't pay and Jesus can redeem everyone. It can also make someone like me, who never had a "past" in the way people talk about that, feel like they have a second-class testimony. 

The Purpose of Marriage

The following post is excerpted from the chapter, "The Purpose of Marriage," in my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

At some point, all the practical questions about marriage find their basis in the central question of what marriage is supposed to be all about. One might think that we should begin with that question, but in reality none of us do. Ask most couples when they’re about to get married, and they will tell you that they’re getting married because “We’re in love.” Doubtless at the time, that is true. Ask a couple on the verge of divorce why they got married in the first place, and sometimes they’ll say the same thing, and say that later on they fell out of love. If they’re being sincerely reflective, though, they’ll acknowledge ulterior motives. She wanted to get out of her parents’ house and couldn’t afford to be on her own. He wanted sex, and for religious or other reasons didn’t want simply to sleep around. She wanted the security of a committed relationship. He was afraid he was going to lose her if he didn’t lock in the relationship with a ring. She hadn’t had a lot of guys interested in her, and felt that this was the best she could do. He had been scared to death of marriage, until he ended up being more scared of ending up alone. She wanted children and didn’t want to raise them alone. There are a multitude of reasons. Feel free to swap the pronoun genders around: none of these reasons are specific to men or to women in particular.

So which is true? The romantic version at the time, or the jaded version from years later? Most likely, both are. People are complex beings, and we all have ulterior motives, whether we think we do or not. It doesn’t make the love we feel at the time any less real.

But the important issue is not what we think marriage is all about. Rather, it’s what does God think marriage is all about? Why did he create marriage? What is it for? How is it supposed to function in our lives?

Christian Married Sexuality (part 2)

The following post is adapted from the chapter, "Sexuality," from my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God. 

Check out Part 1 of this series by clicking here.

Sex and the Christian Marriage

The previous post of course leads to the question: what is healthy sexuality in marriage? A favorite text that seems to address this topic is Hebrews 13:4, which reads in the King James Version, “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.” This looks like an endorsement of marriage itself and of married sexuality (take that, Jerome!), and I recall having heard a number of sermons that focused on this endorsement as an affirmation of the goodness and rightness of married sex. Not only that, but it was pretty much interpreted to mean that anything goes within the marriage relationship. Nonetheless, contextual indicators lead most modern translations and commentators to take the passage as an imperative: “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral” (NIV). While this is doubtless the correct translation, it reopens the question of what keeps the marriage bed pure. Is an undefiled marriage bed one in which sexuality is restricted only to procreation? Is it one in which only the missionary position is used? Is there stuff that’s allowable and stuff that isn’t for a married couple?

Those looking for specific techniques and detailed strategies will have to go to other writers. However, the immediate context seems to spell out the intent of the author of Hebrews: what would defile the marriage bed is adultery and sexual immorality. That is to say, it wasn’t anything happening between the married partners, but rather when one of the partners committed infidelity of some sort. The kinds of things that defile the marriage bed are the same kinds of things that eventually lead to permissible divorce and remarriage, according to Jesus. When the author of Hebrews says that the “marriage bed [should be] kept pure,” he essentially means to keep other people out of it. (tweet this)

Christian Married Sexuality (part 1)

The following post is adapted from the chapter, "Sexuality," from my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

On the evening when Cecile first came to church with me, a group of us went out afterward to a Big Boy restaurant. Pastor Bill, our College and Career pastor, came out to eat with us—probably to get to know Cecile better and witness to her—and sat down with Cecile, me, and my best friend Dave. He was asking her questions, and I was mostly nervously listening. I didn’t really know this woman all that well, although I knew enough to know she was liable to say anything. I felt that whatever she said would reflect on me, even though it wasn’t as though we were dating or anything.

After learning about her background, her divorce, and the loss of her children, Pastor Bill asked her, “So have you ever thought about becoming a Christian?”

“Well, I did for a while, but then I heard that you had to give up sex, so I thought, Forget that!”

Dave snorted Coke out of his nose, and I started slinking under the table. Pastor Bill didn’t miss a beat, though. He simply replied, “Well, that is an obstacle for a lot of people. What you have to decide is, what’s more important?”

Cecile didn’t betray that Pastor Bill was getting to her, but she went home thinking about the conversation, and within a week, she had given her life to Jesus. That was to be the beginning of living celibate for two years before we got married.

Finding "The Right One"

The following post is excerpted from the chapter, "Finding the Right One" in my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

The question of whether we married “the right person” hinges on a very faulty and foolish view of marriage. According to this view, God has planned out one and only one perfect person for you, and you need to find that person or your life will be a living hell from that moment on. Everything hinges on that choice.

Is it any wonder that young people are so freaked out by the prospect of marriage?

What this leads to is a very selfish view of what finding a spouse is like. Singles evaluate one another based on how well they think that other person is going to meet their needs, wants, desires, and ambitions. Everyone is trying to find the “right person” for themselves, and no one is trying to become the right person for someone else.(Tweet this!) When we expect someone else to meet all of our needs, hopes, and dreams, we set that person up for failure. No human being can fulfill us in that way. Meanwhile, while we’re constructing the pedestal for someone else to fall off of, we’re also short-circuiting the process by which God might be trying to tell us that our perceived needs, ambitions, dreams, and goals could be wrong. Why should we bother changing these expectations—or even evaluating them to see if they need to change—if the real problem is that we just haven’t found the Right Person to meet them yet?

We’re creating an idol out of that person—whether it’s someone we think we’ve already met, or whether they’re still just a figment of our imagination whom we’re sure is out there, somewhere. We’re putting them in the place of God. When a real person occupies that space, they can’t possibly live up to our pre-made image of them.

New distribution for Marriage, Family, and the Image of God

I'm happy to report that my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God, is now available for the Apple universe on iTunes, as well as in ePub format at Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and other online retailers.

It's also still available for Kindle on Amazon, and as a paperback at CreateSpace, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers.

If you're interested in the big picture of what marriage and family are all about, and if you're interested in seeing how that connects with us being created in God's image, please check it out! And if you like it, please post an honest review on the site where you purchased it. That would really do a lot to help me spread the word. Thanks!

Why I Married a Divorced Woman

Shiela over on To Love, Honor, and Vacuum has a very thoughtful, carefully-considered post entitled, "Why I'm Anti-Divorce and Pro Remarriage." I wouldn't necessarily dot every i or cross every t precisely as she has, but she has the main idea dead-on right: that even though God hates divorce (Malachi 2:16), he doesn't hate divorce in isolation, as though he just thought up something arbitrary to hate. He hates it for a reason, and that reason--stated in the verse--is because divorce is a form of violence against the person one has married. If he hates it for a reason, then there might be reasons why it would be allowed, if the marriage itself has become a form of violence, if one person has made it clear that he or she is refusing to honor the vows taken when they married. This is precisely what Jesus said: "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). God never intended marriage to be temporary, at least within this lifetime, but because people's hearts are hard, it had to be allowed to prevent the worse evil of someone being trapped by a marriage covenant that the other person has no intent to honor.

All of this became very real to me when I began getting to know my wife, Cecile, who had been divorced several months before I met her. The full story is told in my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God, but I want to share here, briefly, why a young man who had grown up in the church, was waiting for sex until marriage, and had dedicated his life to pursuing God's purposes, chose to marry a divorced woman.

The Not-So-Romantic Tale of Jacob, Rachel and Leah

Those of us who grew up in the church are familiar with the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. After fleeing for his life from his brother Esau, Jacob comes to his relative Laban in Haran to find a wife, and meets Rachel, Laban's daughter. He falls in love with her at once and makes an arrangement to work for seven years to earn her hand in marriage. At the end of the seven years, Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Rachel's older sister Leah instead, and Jacob works another seven years for Rachel. The story is almost always presented as a beautiful love story with a touch of intrigue thrown in. Laban is considered a rotten trickster, Leah his accomplice, Jacob is viewed as receiving a bit of poetic justice after having tricked his brother and his father out of the oldest child's traditional birthright, and Rachel has the role of the hapless heroine, caught in the middle of this mess through no fault of her own. It is often pointed out that "Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her" (Gen. 29:20).

We are told that "Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance. Jacob loved Rachel" (Gen 29:17-18). Commentators are not agreed on what the "weakness" of Leah's eyes means. Most seem not to believe that it reflects poor eyesight or blindness; the majority seem to believe that her eyes were simply unattractive--possibly blue, which may have been considered a defect in the ancient Middle East. Adam Clarke has an intriguing suggestion: that the "weakness" of Leah's eyes reflects not a negative quality but a positive one--that she did have pretty eyes, but by contrast, Rachel's entire "form and appearance" were attractive, and therefore Jacob gave his love to Rachel. One way or another, it was Rachel's beauty that swayed Jacob. There's nothing wrong with this, in and of itself: many significant women in the Bible are described as being beautiful. But if we look at the respective characters of Leah and Rachel, and the results that came from the two marriages, a picture emerges that is very different from the romantic one usually taught.

Marriage, Family, and the Image of God: If It's Permanent, Make It Good

This post is adapted from a chapter of my upcoming book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

Cecile and I decided, even before we got married, that if marriage was permanent, we needed to make a commitment to make it good. That, I believe, is one of the primary reasons that God created marriage to be permanent. Of course he wants to spare us the pain of broken marriages and families. But he also wants us to take the permanence seriously, so that we will decide to make it the best we can, and so that in doing so, we will suppress the individual selfishness that has plagued human beings since the Fall.

The best thing you can do, once you’ve decided to make marriage permanent, is to make it good. And the only way to make it good is to resolve that you are no longer two people but one, that all decisions need to be made with “us” and “we” as the focus, not “you” and “me.” And that takes a willingness for self-sacrifice that, humanly, we don’t have, which is why so many marriages end up miserable and broken. But by seeking God’s help to overcome our innate selfishness, God can use our marriages to mold us into his own self-sacrificial nature; in other words, to conform us into the image of his Son. Other life paths, of course, can accomplish the same thing—those who are married don’t have an exclusive avenue into the image of God. But marriage does have unique challenges. No other relationship is as capable of fostering so much intimacy and creating so much pain.

Marriage, Family, and the Image of God - In the Beginning

This is a first draft of the first chapter of my upcoming book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God. Enjoy!

Cecile and I first met during the summer after I had finished my first year in seminary. I was back home for the summer, and the job I thought I’d had lined up had fallen through. I got a temporary job doing data entry for a travel agency that was converting its files from one format into another. The job was from five at night to one in the morning, for about two and a half weeks.

I was one of three men among about a hundred women working on this project. Since I was shy, this was pretty intimidating, so when an attractive tall blonde in a red dress smiled at me, I stuck with her. Not for the reasons you might think. I went for short brunettes at the time, and I’d just had my heart broken, so I wasn’t looking for anything beyond a summer job. She smiled at me, so I thought she was safe.

She wasn’t safe.

Why Joseph's Choice Matters

The Of Dust and Kings blog has a great article: "Divorce: Joseph and the Essence of Sacrificial Love." Here's a snippet:

Pregnant? The accusations rattle in his head, but he bites his tongue. And then, as if the pregnancy was not wounding enough, his adulterous betrothed goes on to insult his intelligence with some mystical story regarding an angel, and a divine pregnancy from God Himself.

“Yes, Joseph, I’m pregnant… but I promise I never had sex. I’m a virgin, and God magically made me pregnant! Pinky swear!”

So now he faces a choice. Betrayed, insulted, humiliated, angry, hurt – all the emotion swirls about within him, threatening to consume him, and he has to choose how to respond.

Most of us know how this all turned out, but TE Hanna really makes one think about the options Joseph really had and the price he paid for choosing the one he did. Great stuff. Check it out. 

For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today....

Twenty years ago today I sealed my fate.

I had met Cecile two years earlier at a temporary job. We should have known one another less than three weeks. She had just been through a bitter divorce and was not crazy about men. To an engaged girl at our table she had said, "Give me five minutes and I'll have you talked out of it." When she found out I was a follower of Jesus, her first question was, "So what's this crap about women submitting to men, anyway?"

But she was searching--deeply, deeply searching--and when she came to Jesus she fell harder than anyone I'd ever known. Her life was transformed virtually overnight. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. And so I began falling in love with her, despite myself. We struggled, that summer, with an attraction neither one of us wanted to admit to or to act on, and when I left for grad school that year, we had no commitment to one another.

But without me being there as an ulterior motive, she kept going to church. She read the Bible through, in about eight months, even though she had never been much of a reader. We kept in contact by letters and recorded cassettes. She asked me questions about my faith and my views of life; I learned everything I could about her--who she was, what she cared about. And by the time I came back home the following summer, I knew I was going to ask her to marry me.

We went to eat at Mexican Village, then took the Ambassador Bridge over to Windsor, sat in a park watching the sunset over the Detroit skyline, and I asked her to marry me. Disconcertingly, she welled up with tears and didn't answer at first. But she eventually said yes, which led up to that day, twenty years ago today, when we got married.

Not at our own church, sadly. They wouldn't allow divorcees to be married there. And we never knew until later to what extent Bill, our college-and-career pastor, had gone out on a limb to marry us. We found a church near my home and made the preparations. Guys have no clue, until they've been through it, how many preparations even a "small" wedding entail. For the groom, the necessary ingredients are a license, a ring, and a getaway car. Brides have slightly more elaborate ideas. And although all kinds of crazy things went wrong at the rehearsal and the morning of the wedding--a groomsman forgot to show up to the rehearsal, a friend who made our wedding cake got into a car accident and spent the night fixing the cake, Bill locked his suit in his car--the ceremony itself was beautiful.

And so we were married, and when we left the reception I giddily took off down I-696, missed the turnoff down I-275, and drove probably 20 miles westbound on I-96 before realizing that we were headed toward Lansing instead of toward our hotel in Romulus. The following day we left for our honeymoon in Ludington, which was probably about the happiest week of my life.

We have a framed engagement photo in our bedroom, and occasionally I look at that picture, at the couple so full of hope. I miss them. The years that have gone by haven't been what either one of us had expected. But there is no one I would rather have gone on this journey with than Cecile. No one even comes close.

Twenty years ago today, I married the most remarkable woman I know, or can even imagine. She has been the best friend anyone could ever have, the most loyal, the most fun, the most supportive. Although I was instrumental in leading her to faith, she has been the one who has most strongly helped me to continue in faith myself. She has gone with me to the UP, to Pennsylvania, and back to Detroit with scarcely any complaint. She looks for and encourages the best in me, even though she's seen me at my worst. She's kind and loving and far more elegant than she has any idea of. She has given me three wonderful sons. And whatever else is happening in this world, whatever hurtfulness or cruelty or unkindness comes against us in day-to-day life, she has made a home that is always safe to come to, where we can be ourselves. Where it doesn't matter what we have or don't have, what we've achieved or haven't achieved, where the only thing that matters is that we love God and love one another. She is truly the greatest blessing of my life.

What we have together is what I wish every couple had. I wish I could give away our secret, but the truth is, I don't really know what the secret is. If I had to boil it down, I'd say that "us" is more important than "me" to both of us. But really, I think she lives that out better than I do.

So here's to my Cecile. Twenty years ago today, I made the best decision of my life. I can't possibly express the gratitude I have for her. Here's looking forward to the next twenty. 



For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

What's the Atmosphere in Your Home?

Jim Martin writes a terrific post about the emotional atmosphere in homes. This might possibly be one of the most important and neglected issues that almost all of us deal with. None of us control the atmosphere in our homes totally (unless, perhaps, in a negative way). But we all contribute.

Check it out.


For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Settling for Mr. Good Enough?

The March Issue of Atlantic Monthly has an article by Lori Gottlieb entitled, "Marry Him!" on "settling." As in, a woman lowering her expectations and marrying a guy who she doesn't see as her one and only perfect "soul mate." I agree with the general point and many of the specific assertions of the article.

Thing is, I find the language insulting and demeaning.

Gottlieb writes from the perspective of a 40-year-old single woman who has realized the pitfalls of "waiting for Mr. Right," recognized the benefits of marriage, even if it isn't to the idyllic man of a woman's dreams, and cautiously advocates settling "young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods." She correctly recognizes that marriage isn't mostly about romantic bliss; it's about "having a teammate" to go through life with, to share responsibilities and chores. She's absolutely right.

The problem is that the language of "settling" is, well, unsettling. I kept reading through the article looking for clues that this was all tongue in cheek, that all this talk of settling was really a matter of being both realistic and simply fair to any real live flawed human man who might actually be interested in marriage. There was one, just one, nearing the conclusion of the article, tucked away in a parenthesis:

Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

The man of a woman's dreams doesn't exist, can't exist; and yet men are faulted for not being that. Even though Gottlieb pokes holes in the fairy tale that some day your prince will come, she also makes it clear that settling is still settling to her. The images of men that she discusses are all in some degree repulsive, which I get is her point, but it still puts the woman in the place of looking down her nose at her prospects and giving in to the inevitable with a weary sigh. Any faults that the woman has are attributed to age and motherhood, and Gottlieb discusses the unfair nature of the fact that women lose their appeal earlier than men do (although this is largely due to the fact that women are attracted to older men; whose fault is that?). Gottlieb simply doesn't deal with the issue of how pretentious it is for a woman to set such impossible standards in the first place. What woman could live up to such standards from a man?

Gottlieb argues that men don't settle, and when they do, they don't seem to mind it. She's missed the point entirely. Men settle all the time. Where does she think the stereotype of the Man Afraid of Commitment, the Sweaty Groom Looking for a Way Out, comes from? But men don't generally call it settling, because they don't generally have such Impossible Dreams floating around in their heads in the first place. They don't think of it as settling. They think of it as being realistic. "Dude, you're not going to do better than her," is a perfectly plausible and common conversation for men to have.

So my advice to women would be, don't settle. Because as long as you're thinking of it as "settling," you're demeaning the person you're committing your life to. First, get rid of the notion that one man is going to bring you unending happiness, that all your problems are due to not having him, or once you have him, that all your problems are due to his flaws. Dump the ego trip that says that anything other than the Prince Charming in your brain (to whom you've probably attributed self-contradictory attributes, anyway) is beneath you. Recognize that you're a human being, and any guy you meet is a human being, and if you find someone who treats you with kindness and respect and sticks in there through the long haul, then you're pretty lucky.

Then, you won't have to settle.

 

 

For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

 

Love and the Pro-Con List

Julie has another terrific post, this time about expectations of singles for marriage, especially among Christian singles. Well worth checking out. I'm going to do a bit of fisking here, but in a good way.

Julie writes,

During my first year of college (which was a Bible college), there was a girl named April who firmly believed that she was so special and unique in God's sight -- this had been drummed into her head by well-meaning parents, teachers, and youth pastors trying to protect their young flock -- that her list of qualifications for a guy was incredibly long and incredibly impossible. Nothing but the best for her, she insisted, pointing out that God wanted the best for his daughters. April did not have any comparative list of such actual qualities in herself.

Just so. I've observed before that everyone is always looking for the "right person" for himself or herself; hardly anyone is looking to become the "right person" for someone else. Which, when you think about it, is pure selfishness: I want precisely what I want, at the least possible cost or annoyance to me. What's more, that process of becoming "right" for one another doesn't end with an engagement, or even a wedding. It's a lifelong process of learning, growing, reacting, rebuking, and generally becoming intertwined.

Think about it. People are fluid. You're not the same as you were a decade ago. You won't be the same in another decade. How can you possibly know what future-you will need or value most? How can you know if future-him or future-her will be able to provide it? So how can a list, based on present-day needs and expectations, possibly forecast the future?

At some point, we have to realize that the process of becoming one is a lifelong process, directed by God, sometimes painful to our individual desires, but nonetheless beautiful, wonderful, and eminently worthwhile. I don't know who I would be without Cecile in my life for the past eighteen years; I'm not sure I want to know.

Too often the phrase "God has called me to be single" is a Bible-laced excuse to continue being selfish, fearful, proud, and content with smooth sailing. Many beautiful books and web sites by lovely men and women discuss singlehood as if we were all Paul, mysteriously and unfairly going through life without the healing of our affliction.

Yes. Reread 1 Corinthians 7. Does Paul ever say that singleness was to be pursued for its own sake? That it's a spiritually superior mode of being? No. All his reasons for preferring and advocating singleness are practical. Singleness is practically preferable for a dangerous, itinerant ministry like Paul's (you don't have to worry about how your family will be provided for while you're being thrown in jail, thrown out of town, and shipwrecked) and in times of persecution (you don't have to worry about what will happen to them if you're beheaded). It allows you to focus on service to God, exclusively. So if someone genuinely has that gift and is genuinely called to be single, then they will also be called to some form of ministry that makes apparent why marriage would be significantly detrimental in that situation.

I'm not saying that everyone who is not specifically called to singleness must get married by age x, to the first available candidate. I am saying that avoiding marriage out of fear and selfishness, and calling it a calling, is wrong. Marriage and parenthood are two of the most powerful tools God uses to get our focus off of ourselves and make us part of something larger. They teach us things that are difficult to learn in any other way.

The Evangelical world should stop having singles ministry that encourages singles to stay single and get their weekly relationship fix over pizza or coffee with the rest of the group -- sans any icky side effects from commitment -- and instead tell them to quit waiting for "the right one" and get over themselves and get married to a good and decent one.

Oh yes. What biblical justification is there, anyway, for this concept of "the right one"? That if you don't marry the one person in six billion that God has Specially Chosen Just for You, that life will be toast? As Julie says, we've become "vast herds of terrified, lonely, confused people insisting that good people right beside them simultaneously moving in the same direction are not the right people." If we find someone who is good and decent and loves God and we're genuinely attracted to them and we share interests and like being together, then that should be enough to start on. God will take care of the rest.

Please understand. I'm not saying take the plunge hastily or thoughtlessly. And we are entitled to our own preferences. But somehow, because of fear of making a mistake, we've forgotten that marriage is also a gift. A really, really good gift.

Kudos to Julie. Brave words, coming from someone who is single herself. So far. Check out the entire post; there's a lot more there.

 

 

For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

 

All the Lonely People

Updated to correct the spelling of Paul McCartney's name. I can't believe that no one called me on this. I'm so ashamed.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
-- Paul McCartney, "Eleanor Rigby"

There's been a fascinating discussion about male and female relationships going on at this post on the Lone Prairie Blog and an earlier post of mine. In the comments section of my blog, I stated the following:

Here's my take: men don't actually pursue friendships with women. That's not to say that men and women can't be friends, as in, friendly acquaintances who like to chat when they're together in a group situation. But if a man is pursuing a one-on-one friendship, he almost always has the possibility of a romantic relationship in reserve. He may back off and say that he just wanted to be friends, after the fact, maybe because he decided he didn't want to pursue a relationship after all, maybe because he got scared, maybe because he thinks you're not interested. But simply the close proximity and interaction of an attractive woman will start things buzzing in a man.

to which Julie replied,

"Here's my take: men don't actually pursue friendships with women."

I have a hard time believing that.... is that generally true? Or is that just Keith-true? ... I have lots of guy "friends." I'm full up on that. Friends galore. No indication of anything but friends.

Well, the truth of my statement depends on how you understand it. One could understand it to mean that guys are, after all, really only after One Thing, and are incapable of dealing with women on any other basis. Which would, a) truly be depressing, and b) make me, the author of such a statement, a pig. Luckily, I'm not a pig, and that's not what I meant.

Guy Friendship and Chick Friendship

Part of the answer lies in understanding the differences between men and women on what they mean by "being friends." C.S. Lewis discusses friendship in the Phileo section of The Four Loves. Unlike eros, which is a face-to-face relationship whose object is one another, friendship is a side-by-side relationship whose object is a common interest. That's a very good description of male friendships. Men tend to be friends because they have a common interest: baseball, Spider-man comics, astronomy. Their friendship is about that common interest, and not about one another. If a man loses interest in the thing they have in common, he will generally drift away from the friendship, and usually there will not be hurt feelings, unless the other guy has no other friends and suddenly feels isolated.

From what I've gathered, female friendships, especially close ones, are not like that. Women analyze their friendships like they analyze romantic relationships. They feel much more like they have a claim on their friends; they will get offended and angry if they feel neglected by their friend. They may include shared interests, but the real interest is one another.

Guys, in general, do not have that kind of friendship with one another. They generally pursue that kind of friendship in the context of a romantic relationship with a woman. Most guys would feel a little creeped out if a male friend started making the claims on their friendship that women routinely make on theirs--specifically because they would interpret such an interest in them (and not in the shared interest of the friendship) in sexual terms.

"Let's be friends."

So let's say a man says to a woman, "Let's be friends." What are the possible meanings of that statement?

1. I have no interest in a romantic relationship with you, but I don't want to hurt your feelings.
2. You seem friendly/nice/enjoyable/nonthreatening, and I like hanging with you in group situations.
3. Hey, you like hunting/theology/chess too? Cool! Wanna go to the convention next week?
4. I find you intriguing and I'd like to get to know you better, and see where things might develop.

You may have noticed that #1 and #4 are almost diametrically opposite. Evidently women don't have the market cornered on "complex." At any rate, #1 is the standard "Let's be friends" speech. Nuff said--for now.

#2 is on the level of group friendship. This can seriously mean nothing, although sometimes shy guys will seek out no more than this with someone they're secretly interested in. It can also be a difficult platform from which to grow anything more: you feel conspicuous, like the whole group is watching your relationship develop. Is it any wonder that people in church youth and singles groups often find boyfriends/girlfriends from outside the group?

#3 is the typical level of male friendship. This is the really ambiguous level, because a shared interest is a perfect pretext for a date. What you're wanting to do here is to figure out whether the guy is mostly interested in the museum/the Renaissance Festival/the Star Trek convention itself, and just likes having you along because you said you liked it too, or if he mostly likes being with you, and the venue doesn't seem to matter.

#4 is the level of friendship that I meant when I said "Men don't pursue friendships with women." Because the truth is, men don't pursue friendships at all. They pursue football/computer games/film noir, and are glad to have someone to share their interest. But they don't pursue friendships. So level 4, to a man, is the beginning of a romantic relationship.

The confusing part to a woman is that level 4 is actually the normal level of a close female friendship (well, without the "see where things might develop" part. I'm not trying to be wierd here). They're interested in each other, as well as whatever interests they may have in common. So it seems plausible to a woman that a man might be pursuing a close friendship, and just mean it as friendship.

Mixed Messages

So what does it mean when a man's actions indicate a level 4 interest, but his words indicate a level 1 cutting off of romantic possibilities? To be blunt, he's lying.

There might be a ton of reasons why. Maybe he's afraid of commitment; maybe he's afraid his interest isn't reciprocated; maybe he's had bad experiences with dating before and decided that upping the ante will ultimately mean losing what he has now. This is where "Eleanor Rigby" comes into play. There are two people in the song: Eleanor Rigby and Father MacKenzie, both of whom are alone. They could have found love with one another, but they were blind to one another.

Personally, I think we have a whole generation like that, people who have grown up with divorce and broken relationships and a lack of cultural rules for dating and relationships, people scared to death of ending up with The Wrong One and so torpedoing every decent relationship that comes along, until they're even more scared of ending up alone, and so the next relationship magically becomes The Right One. That's what I was seeing when I was Single and Not Very Happy About That Fact, and it seems to me that it's only gotten worse.

What people need to realize is that marriage is almost always really made or destroyed within the marriage. Unless someone has made a stupid mistake (believers marrying unbelievers is the most common and biggest), marriage takes just one thing: "us" and "we" instead of "you" and "me." If I focus on what I want, to the exclusion of what my wife wants, then I'm just asking for trouble in our marriage. But if I pursue marriage with a focus on what's best for us together and not me individually, and if my wife does the same thing, then we have the potential for a fantastic marriage. It's a matter of perspective and choices that we make within the marriage, not the particular person. And if single people could get hold of that truth, it would make dating a lot less stressful.

So, what does a woman do with a man who's denying his own feelings like that? I wish I knew. The only thing I can suggest is not to make herself available for that kind of ambiguous relationship. "I can be your tennis buddy, or I can be your girlfriend, but I won't be your security blanket with nothing in return." Make him make a decision. Beyond that, both men and women could do with a little less trying to find the Right Person for themselves, and do a little more with trying to become the Right Person for someone else.

And that's all I have to say about that.
--Forrest Gump

For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Useful Guy Info for Residents of Chickville

There's been a very interesting discussion at the Lone Prairie Blog on Julie's post, "Useful chick info for residents of guyville." She threw down the gauntlet for a man to come up with the reverse list, so here's my attempt (same caveats apply as in her post--I don't speak for all guys; when I say "guys," I really mean "guys like me," which might possibly describe a set composed of exactly one person):

1. Guys cannot read your mind. I know that this completely obliterates your secret fantasy of the perfect man who will unfailingly know exactly what you want all the time and give it to you without you even having to ask, but it can't be helped. It's not just an act. We really are that dense.
2. You cannot read our minds. I know that you think that you know what we're thinking, but we're probably thinking something else. It's quite possible, even likely, that we're thinking of nothing at all. We also don't know that you don't know what we're thinking and want to know, or that you are probably guessing a thousand guesses, all incorrect. There's nothing to be done for it: you'll just have to break down and ask.
3. Men and women handle stress differently. Most of you tend to need to talk it out with someone else. Most of us tend to want to escape into a hobby and try to forget about it. John Gray calls it "cave time." We need cave time. It's not about shutting you out; it's about trying to calm down and not get ourselves worked up all over again.
4. We are the true romantics. This is contrary to popular belief, but that's because romance tends to be defined as things men do for women. Who's more romantic: the woman who likes to receive flowers, or the man who doesn't care a bit about flowers but goes and buys them for the woman he loves simply to make her happy? Men--until they've been burned and heartbroken sufficiently--simply fall in love and don't see anything else; it's women who want to analyze the relationship. This is not a good or a bad thing on either party's part--some relationships need to be analyzed.
5. Both we and you recognize something about women, but we describe it in different ways. Women call it being complex; men generally see it as being either crazy or dishonest. Nice guys--the kind of guy that a woman will say she wants--will get dumped for guys who are jerks. I have been the "shoulder to cry on" for a woman bemoaning the fact that a certain guy she was interested in didn't notice her, and I was sworn to secrecy, lest the other guy find out how she feels--and then, when I finally told her (later on, when she wasn't hung up on someone else) of my interest in her, she told me I had been "dishonest" for not having told her before. These kind of inconsistencies (or "complexities," if you will) drive us crazy.
6. We hate it--vicious, vile, ugly hatred--when you ask us to do something embarrassing that you could have done yourself, but didn't do so because you didn't want to be embarrassed.
7. We know that you would like us to be the initiators. However, if we're not among the 10% that is being chased by 90% of you (same percentages apply in reverse as well), we've probably been shot down enough to be pretty gun-shy. You're going to have to give us at least some indication that you'd be receptive to an invitation.
8. Much of what appears to you to be a fear of commitment is actually a healthy respect for responsibility. You have a tendency to want us to be ecstatic over life changes that dramatically increase our responsibilities. Many of you tend to see marriage as a source of security; most of us (or at least the best of us) see it as a significant responsibility. Even if we both work, guys will view providing for us, and later for a family, as primarily on us. The birth of a child, especially a first child, hits us in the same way. Nothing prepares us for marriage but marriage; nothing prepares us for fatherhood but fatherhood. Please try not to be too disappointed in our reactions.
9. We are far too prone to think we know you before we really do, especially if we're attracted to you. We fill in the gaps of what we don't know with our hopes and expectations. The death stroke for one relationship I had, although it lasted for another few months, was a game of Scruples, in which I simply could not believe that my girlfriend really would drive someone into bankruptcy by holding them to an ill-considered contract.
10. We don't understand why you break up with us. This is partially due to the fact that you actually do not tell us why you break up with us (more often than not, we believe, merely to spare our feelings). As we get older, the more observant of us figure out that there are a myriad of reasons, often involving your belief that we will at some point break up with you, and you'd rather be the dumper than the dumped. For our part, we don't end relationships unless we actually want to end them; we don't end them because we've analyzed them and decided that they're doomed (see #4). Since we don't understand this at a young enough age to do us any good, we don't understand that you grieve relationships that you yourselves ended. Hence the bitterness you've frequently encountered.

For all that, we really are still crazy about you. Most of this relates to a period in my life I call, "Single and not very happy about that fact." But God has given me a wonderful wife and a wonderful marriage. I'm truly grateful for the heartbreaks I've had in the past, because they left me open for my marriage with Cecile. He knew better than I did what the fully-adult me would need.


For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Dating My Wife

I recently had the pleasure of taking my wife out on a very nice date.

It began a few months ago, when I saw a billboard offering tickets to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at a very reduced rate. I checked it out online, hoping for some orchestral jazz (Branford Marsalis is one of the featured artists this season), but due to scheduling issues, ended up choosing a night when the featured performer was piano virtuoso Yefim Bronfmann playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3. Then, I simply told my wife, "Don't make plans for May 25. We're going out, and you'll need to dress up."

There is enormous power in the anticipation of the unknown.

As the date approached, some other things providentially came together. I emailed some close friends of ours, mainly just to let them know that this deal was going on, and told them if they happened to want to go to the same event we were going to, this was the date and here were our seats. They emailed me back: "We're two rows behind you." I was also recognized for going a bit over and above at work, and my boss gave me a gift card to a local restaurant. And Cecile's sister graciously offered to stay with our boys at our house, so we wouldn't have to worry about picking them up from somewhere else and we wouldn't have to worry about how late we were staying out. So now I had the prospect of a nice dinner and then an evening at Orchestra Hall with dear friends, and surprising my wife with all of it.

As we got closer to the date, the anticipation grew. Cecile got me to tell some mutual friends where we were going, so that those friends could tell her what kind of "dressy" she should go with. She ended up choosing something eminently suitable, and the day finally came. I took her out for the first leg, and I highly recommend the prime rib at Marinelli's. It was a nice time of just relaxing and talking. She still didn't know where the evening would end up. Finally, we went down to Orchestra Hall. I got my directions a bit mixed up and ended up driving into the Wayne State University campus. Eventually I figured out where it was, and when we got to a place to park, we saw our friends already parking in the very next space. Again, providential.

The music was gorgeous. Seeing the orchestra was amazing; intricate bowing and plucking techniques were performed by thirty or forty string players who sounded exactly like one. Bronfmann was amazing on the piano. The sound in Orchestra Hall was superb. Cecile was thrilled, and my friend Bob knew some things about the musical history involved. We went out for dessert afterward, and then home. It was a lovely night.

The point of all this is, how many of us seriously put the effort into dating our spouses that we did when we were trying to win them? It's not easy, when you're living together and sharing a bank account, to truly surprise someone. And outside-the-box opportunities like this don't happen every day. But if we take our spouses for granted, we shouldn't be surprised when they begin acting like they're being taken for granted. I'm not trying to take undue credit; this fell into my lap, and I just took advantage of opportunities. Maybe a night with the orchestra isn't your type of thing, but find something, some way to bless that person that God put into your life. It'll be well worth it. I guarantee it.


For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Finding the Right Husband or Wife

Joe Carter has a great post on finding the right husband or wife. It's a review of a book by Alex and Marni Chediak entitled With One Voice: Singleness, Dating and Marriage to the Glory of God.

The basic point of the post (and apparently, the book) is that it is more important to work toward becoming the right person for someone else, rather than to try to find "Mr. or Miss Right." During the period of time in my life that I call, "Single and Not Very Happy About That Fact," I figured this out: everyone seemed to be trying to find the right person for them (i.e., the person who will accommodate all of their whims and fulfill all their dreams and not require them to change at all) and not at all trying to become the kind of person who could be a good husband or wife for someone else.

The pattern that I saw was repeated relationships and break-ups, over and over again (well, except for those of us who had a difficult time getting anything going to begin with), until finally the person became more fearful of being left alone than of marrying The Wrong Person--at which point the next dating relationship magically became The One.

Another mistake singles make when dating and looking for a marriage partner is assuming that marriage is supposed to be the panacea that makes all of life a state of joy. The Chediaks write, "Women have been duped by the media into thinking that marriage must be
a state of perpetual bliss and that, if it is not, something must be
wrong with their partner" (p. 47). There are two things going wrong here: unrealistic expectations regarding what marriage should be like, and the assumption that anything that goes wrong must be the fault of one's "partner"--i.e., never oneself (or just the reality of living in a fallen world).

Much marital unhappiness comes from failing to recognize that putting marriage on such a pedestal is a form of idolatry, and marriage can never live up to these expectations. It can be wonderful--the very best relationship one can ever have with another human being--but only when both people are willing to adjust to one another's flaws and foibles, and are willing to try their best to be the best husband or wife they can be. 


For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Marriage, RIP

Dr Ray Pritchard cites a Seattle Times article claiming, based on US Census statistics, that households headed by a married couple had fallen to less than 50% of total US households. A few numbers demonstrate the trend:

1930: 84%
1990: 56%
2006: 49.7%

The Times article quotes Steve Watters, director of young adults for Focus on the Family, as saying that "the trend of fewer married couples was more a reflection of delaying marriage than rejection of it." Nonetheless, as the article states, "A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound."

Profound isn't the half of it. This is the iceburg ripping into the hull of the Titanic.

Prichard discusses challenges for the Church to minister to the increasingly diverse groups of non-married people, rather than focusing on married families and having on the side a generic "singles" ministry. These challenges are certainly real and Prichard's suggestions are generally good, but don't address the implications of the social changes reflected by these statistics. Watters appears (in the single quote reported) to be attempting to minimize the issue. Marriage is only being delayed, not rejected. This seems better; in truth, it's almost as bad.

What we're seeing here is something that God designed and intended to function together as an organic whole being dissected into its constituent parts: marriage, parenthood, sexuality, and the image of God. The first social relationship ever entered into was created specifically by God. Here's the narrative:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it...."The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."... So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.... Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.... Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, "With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man." Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.... When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them "man." When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. (Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18, 21-25; 3:20; 4:1; 5:1-3 NIV)

The elements of marriage, sexuality, parenthood, and the image of God are all woven together in this fabric. Marriage is quite simply the fundamental social relationship; it is the first one in existence; it is the only one, in this narrative, that is allowed to trump prior family ties. It is the context in which sexuality occurs; it is the context in which parenthood occurs; it reflects the image of God (the relationship among the members of the Trinity) and transmits that image to the children. The metaphor of threads woven together into a fabric doesn't really do it justice: it's more like the separate organs of a living, breathing, multifaceted organism designed by God and given to us.

Our society is taking this living, organic being and inexorably ripping it into its constituent parts, in the naive assumption that the patient will survive the operation. Why should marriage ("a piece of paper") be necessary if two people are truly in love? Why should marriage be permanent? Why should sexuality be reserved only for marriage? Why should pregnancy be a necessary consideration for sexuality? Why should parenthood be reserved for married couples? Why should any of this be affected by a person's religious beliefs?

The fact that marriage is only being delayed, not denied, doesn't mean that sexuality is being delayed. The sad fact is that this is true even within the church--and everyone knows it. God calls some people to singleness. I'm not arguing against that, and we need to have more respect and honor for those who have been called to that life. But He calls people to celibate singleness, for a purpose; not a prolonged indulgent adolescence in which sexual relationships are repeatedly entered into and ended. We don't recognize what we're doing to ourselves when we live like that: repeatedly creating and ripping apart a one-flesh bond that God intended to last throughout our lives. When couples who have prolonged singleness (but not sexuality) finally do get married, how do they make the shift into a new mode of life, in which this relationship is different, this one will last forever? The sad truth is that often they never do. Statistics show that people who live together before marriage have a 50% or more higher chance of divorce than those who do not; this is true whether it is the cohabitating couple who marry one another or people who have cohabitated with one or more other people before marriage.

The consequences are not merely individual. Married couples and parents have a vested interest in providing for one another and for their children; when these relationships break up, that vested interest breaks down (hence "deadbeat dads") and more children grow up in poverty, more must be provided for by the state or charitable organizations. Parents have a vested interest in caring for their own children and usually do without payment a better job than paid child care. Children who grow up in intact families tend to have a greater sense of security than those who grow up without two parents in the home, and tend to have fewer social adjustment problems; it is likely that the current trend toward deferred marriage is at least in part a result of increasing numbers of children of divorce or single parenthood entering adulthood without having had successful marriages modeled for them, and understandably being anxious about entering into such a significant commitment. Marriage and the nuclear family have been called the building block of civilization; I suspect that's not far off the mark.

Just so this post is not misunderstood, I am not taking a position against birth control, or against sex for purposes other than reproduction, or against divorce in all circumstances, or condemning every instance of single parenthood, or advocating very young marriage. The Bible itself places limits on some of these principles; with regard to some there are other social factors to take into account; and some are issues on which honest and sincere believers can disagree.

My point is simply a lament for the inexorable destruction of something God gave to us as a precious gift. He gave us a fundamental human relationship that provided the context, and much of the transcendent meaning, for sexuality and parenthood. I am blessed with a wonderful marriage and family, and I wish that everyone who doesn't specifically have a gift of celibate singleness could know the joy that marriage and family can be. It saddens me that so many people, even believers, don't have that. It saddens me more that so many have given up on it before ever giving it a chance.

HT: Smart Christian. For much worthwhile information and statistics on the topic of divorce, see the statistics page of the Divorce Reform Page.