Be afraid, be very afraid.
This is the advice to husbands from modern Christian leaders. Where the Bible stresses headship and that our marriage vows bind us for life, the modern Christian leader has fully embraced the threatpoint feminists have implemented to overturn headship. These two changes go hand in hand, as the threatpoint is essential in order to effectively destroy biblical headship. The threatpoint also is an effective marketing tool for an entire industry of Christian marriage counseling, reading from the Book of Oprah. Dennis Rainey of FamilyLife captured the essence of this pitch in his followup on a sermon on submission he aired by Kathy Keller*:
I have to believe, Bob, this weekend conference really is the finest marriage insurance that you could ever buy to be able to, not guarantee your marriage is going to go the distance, but certainly to equip it to go the distance.
Not surprisingly, Rainey also teaches that a Christian husband’s job is to give in when his wife threatens to blow up the family (see also: Fireproof). As you may recall, Rainey is not just the president and CEO of FamilyLife, but he also wrote the book-turned-video-series Stepping Up™, which is a modern Christian call to “godly” manhood. In Scripture, husbands are called to be the spiritual leader of the family, and wash their wives in the water of the word. In the modern Christian frame wives are light years closer to God and are called to lead and instruct their husbands. Rainey’s own wife explains how a modern Christian wife can lead her husband to manhood in her article 5 Ways to Help Your Husband Step Up to Manhood. Mrs. Rainey’s post is overall quite good by modern Christian standards, but it starts from the flawed premise that the wife’s job is to lead her husband, to get him to “Step Up” and become a man:
You’ve probably heard the saying, “Behind every successful man is a strong woman.” Though the statement has been ridiculed as anti-woman, it is, in fact, very true. When you married your husband, he was unsure of himself as a man and was unskilled as a husband. It’s true of all boys who have grown up and gotten married. What males need—what your husband needs—is a wife who believes in him, encourages him, and helps him step up to become the man God created him to be.
…
2. Speak the truth in love. In our marriage, I’ve come to Dennis many times to speak the truth about what’s going on in our family or what I feel is missing in our relationship. There have been seasons when he was traveling too much.
Wives “speaking the truth” to their husbands about what they feel is missing is a very common theme in modern Christian advice on marriage. Mrs. Rainey’s article doesn’t frame this as an ultimatum, but most often it is framed this way. Another FamilyLife article titled Cycle of Unresolved Issues offers an example from Rainey favorites Tim and Kathy Keller:
The cycle goes something like this: a problem surfaces in your relationship, and one of you says, “We have a problem…” but the other person does not take it seriously so the problem is not really addressed. This happens again, then again and again! Despair takes over. One day the one that has been saying, “I need help” gives up and says, “We’re done!” or leaves a note that says, “I’m gone!” This finally gets the other person’s attention, but it may be too late.
“What will it take to get your attention?” In the book The Meaning of Marriage, authors Tim and Kathy Keller relate how Kathy got Tim’s attention by lining up some of her good china, and as soon as Tim walked in the door, breaking it with a hammer. She got his attention!
The author suggests a “less dramatic” way for a wife to do the same thing would be to say to her husband:
I’m starting to feel so discouraged, that unless we address this issue, I don’t think I can continue like this.
I feel really alone. I don’t want to go on like this.
I have this feeling that we are drifting apart. I do not want to live this way.
Note how in a very short article the topic has moved from threats of divorce, to violently breaking valuables, and back to threats of divorce. Rainey’s marriage weekend sales pitch and the message of the Unresolved article remind me of an old Monty Python skit where the mafia tries to extort protection money from an army base commander:
Luigi: (looking round office casually) You’ve … you’ve got a nice army base here, Colonel.
Colonel: Yes.
Luigi: We wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.
Colonel: What?
Dino: No, what my brother means is it would be a shame if… (smashes a piece of china he picked up off the mantel)
It makes me wonder if Kathy Kelley got her idea to break the china on the mantel from the same skit. In the modern Christian version of this old skit, the punchline goes:
It’s a nice family you got here, you wouldn’t want something to happen to it…
The answer of course is to buy marriage insurance (or if you prefer protection) in the form of books, movies, marriage counseling, etc. All of these protection schemes include the same basic advice to husbands:
Grovel.
Grovel hard enough and long enough so she won’t decide to frivolously divorce you.
Grovel like your marriage and family depend on it, because they do.
This advice is not only unbiblical; this anti scriptural message also happens to be disastrous in practice. Groveling won’t make your wife happy, and in all likelihood it will make her even more frustrated.
The latest installment in the grovel like your marriage depends on it message comes from motivational speaker Gerald Rogers**. Rogers found himself on the receiving end of a frivolous divorce a while back:
I was married for about 16 years to an amazing, remarkable woman. I think for most of our marriage, I was under the illusion that everything was perfect. I felt like I was a good husband…
What I didn’t realize was how much of a mask I was living under and how I really didn’t understand how to fill her deepest needs as a woman. And so it was about a year ago that she first let me know she wanted a divorce.
His wife’s brave decision not to honor her marriage vow inspired Rogers to write a list of advice to husbands which has spread like wildfire. Christian marriage author James Russell Lingerfelt was so delighted with the message that he republished the advice as a “love story” under the title Beautiful advice from a divorced man after 16 years of marriage. Piece of advice #1 is Never stop courting… NEVER GET LAZY in your love, while item number three warns that marriage vows aren’t intended to be for life:
Change will come, and in that you have to re-choose each other everyday. SHE DOESN’T HAVE TO STAY WITH YOU, and if you don’t take care of her heart, she may give that heart to someone else or seal you out completely, and you may never be able to get it back. Always fight to win her love just as you did when you were courting her.
While constantly reacting to her changing, we are taught that a husband must be careful never to try to lead his wife. In the modern Christian view washing her in the water of the Word has been replaced by:
5. It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.
*I linked to the Kathy Keller sermon from my post Brilliant Advertising several weeks ago, but I see now that the page is gone. I don’t know if they pulled it entirely or it simply moved. Fortunately I saved a PDF copy of the January 17th 2012 transcript for my own records so I could still quote from it.
Edit: The Wayback Machine was down for maintenance when I first posted this, but now it is back up. They have the main page, but not the mp3 and the pdf cached. However, Marcus D found the link to the pdf which still appears to be on the FamilyLife site (for the time being at least).
**Roissy listed Gerald Rogers as candidate number 3 in a recent (crass site warning) Beta Of the Month post.
Wouldn’t taking marriage advice from Gerald Rogers, someone who quite obviously failed at the whole relationship thing, be the same thing as taking health advice from someone who is dying of lung cancer after smoking 2 packs a day for the last 30 years?
I would feel sorry for the guys, if he wasn’t doing his damnedest to destroy other men’s marriages as well.
So the Churchianity model of a really great marriage is essentially extortion on the part of men.
The transcript is still floating around for people who want it:
https://www.google.ca/#q=“fl2012-01-17”
It appears WordPress was able to mess up the URL – copy the whole second line, or search for what’s in quotes.
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It truly is incredible how well a sales job they do. I am impressed at the feeling, the honesty, the sincere expression. They manage to convey so much meaning and subtle insights into marriage. Each word carefully chosen to craft a larger concept and use that to convince young men. Really, it impresses me to no end, the dedication put into it.
Not to mention that his credibility is beyond reproach. I mean, a man this dedicated to making sure men get married, or rather, that they marry women; who would doubt his evidence? What sense would it make to question his testimony? It is not like he knows how well he sells the life of a bachelor compared to that of a husband.
The Shadowed Knight
Don’t know if this is related, but this is the latest from the “Christian woman” who divorced her husband because she wasn’t “haaaaapy” and is obviously still having a major guilt complex about it, to the point where she now has to write a book to try to justify herself:
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/words-of-hope-if-your-marriage-is-i-unraveling-i.html
Some earlier writings about not being haaaapyyyyyy:
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/the-unraveling-of-a-christian-marriage-three-common-questions.html
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/the-unraveling-of-a-christian-marriage-why-i-m-not-staying-forever.html
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/the-unraveling-of-a-christian-marriage-why-i-stayed.html
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/the-unraveling-of-a-christian-marriage-how-i-stayed.html
I attempted to use advice like that with my (soon to be) ex-wife. It only lead to frustration. Grovelling doesn’t work. In the end, I was forced to accept I must have literally married the wrong woman.
I think churchianity causes a lot of damage to modern marriage, especially to Christian men. They give us advice that is flawed. Then when the marriage fails, they beat us up saying “You didn’t LOVE your wife enough. You didn’t do “The Love Dare” enough times. Now go watch Fireproof six times and listen to Dennis Rainey’s podcast to repent for your failure as a “Christian husband”.”
That reminds me: during the football game on radio this week, a Kansas City law firm specializing in divorce was running ads targeted specifically to men, which were excellent. They mentioned that most of their clients didn’t want divorce, and that the best thing is to keep the marriage together; but that if you don’t have a choice, it’s important to protect your relationship with your kids and your financial ability to support them. One of the best bits went like this (paraphrasing from memory): “One day your wife tells you she wants a divorce. She says she wants to stay friends. She says she wants to be fair to you. Trust her, she says….. Let us suggest a different approach.”
Could there be a less Christian attitude than that? One of the big modern lies is the idea that Jesus loves us just as we are with all our faults. No, he loves us despite our faults, and he very much expects us to change them. “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” If a man does nothing to encourage his wife to fix her faults, he’s failing in his primary obligation to her — to help her get to heaven.
These guys apparently think every married woman is perfect — or they think the pearly gates are wiiiide open.
Oh… the timing of your post. Just this morning, The Deceptive ‘Rain Man’ Dennis Rainey Effect® affected Ryan Seacrest on the most listened music radio show in the world this morning. He gave a ‘Man Up-Step Up’ Rant. We advised against it. He knows why, but some narratives are required by a higher power that is not concerned with ratings or audience size. I’ll add the rant to this post http://wp.me/p3P5mL-6B in an hour.
The truly ‘sick’ that are fans of the movie “Fireproof” would be proud of this out of character experience of the host heard daily in the 50 U S states and around the world.
@Rollo the funding for The Deceptive ‘Rain Man’ Dennis Rainey Effect® appears to be unlimited though it has not appeared on any lists of angel investors yet. This is why your book has to hit #1 on the ‘best seller’ list. No excuses.
Get a smartphone with a camera that can livestream video
“What will it take to get your attention?” In the book The Meaning of Marriage, authors Tim and Kathy Keller relate how Kathy got Tim’s attention by lining up some of her good china, and as soon as Tim walked in the door, breaking it with a hammer. She got his attention!
Hello 911? Police? My wife has gone crazy is armed with a hammer and is smashing things! You need to send the police, and a psychatric intervention team before she destroys the place or hurts someone!
I have this feeling that we are drifting apart. I do not want to live this way.
Isn’t that what Michael Schiavo said Terry said? Dehydration is so slow. I’m personally against euthanasia, but if the wife is going to go murder-suicide for the marriage, I’m willing to go halfway, but only halfway to insure that her wants “not … to live this way” are met.
One explanation for the violence between drug dealers is because they don’t have access to the courts to settle disputes, they have to find other means. Suffice it to say that if I were to marry, at the first sign of wifely uncertanty, I would become Heisenburg. (And yes, i know practical chemistry).
Oh… the timing of your post. Just this morning, The Deceptive ‘Rain Man’ Dennis Rainey Effect® affected Ryan Seacrest on the most listened music radio show in the world this morning. He gave a ‘Man Up-Step Up’ Rant. We advised against it. He knows why, but some narratives are required by a higher power that is not concerned with ratings or audience size. I’ll add the rant to this post http://wp.me/p3P5mL-6B in an hour.
The truly ‘sick’ that are fans of the movie “Fireproof” would be proud of this out of character experience of the host heard daily in the 50 U S states and around the world.
@Rollo the funding for The Deceptive ‘Rain Man’ Dennis Rainey Effect® appears to be unlimited though it has not appeared on any lists of angel investors yet. This is why your book has to hit #1 on the ‘best seller’ list. No excuses.
These guys apparently think every married woman is perfect — or they think the pearly gates are wiiiide open.
Or most likely, they believe (not think, there is no “think” here) both of the above – these two are not contradictory, and it’s not difficult to find women preaching sermons that include both themes on any given Sunday.
Now, on the theme of marriage, and experts, and so forth, consider this blog posting by Albert Mohler:
http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/10/04/two-is-better-than-one-who-knew/
Note this text:
Unrelated evidence for the importance of marriage comes from The Journal of Clinical Oncology. Researchers have documented the fact that on average married cancer patients live longer than unmarried patients.
Then he writes:
You will not be surprised to know that unmarried men are at greatest risk. Wives make a huge difference in the health habits of their husbands, right down to making sure that doctor’s appointments are made and medicines are taken. Nevertheless, married women also survive longer than unmarried women with the same disease. Even husbands really help. Single patients are far more vulnerable.
Got that? Even husbands really help with cancer treatment, sez Rev. Al Mohler.
Gee, Al, I’m sure the married men of America, or at least of the SBC, really appreciate your faint praise. The pedestalization of women and denigration of men that is endemic to the modern US churches is nicely demonstrated, in Mohler’s blog post in support of marriage.
Ironically, it is trivial to find feminists who would line up to denounce Mohler as a major agent of Teh Patriarchy, even as he actually pushes Matriarchy.
I don’t know how far this is getting. I show up to what I would describe as a hardcore Anglican church. We were studying Ephesians via sermon last month, following the BCP readings for Trinity season. When we eventually got to Ephesians 5:22, our pastor gave an impromptu sermon on Christian fellowship and charity. My family assumed it was in light of recent vestry conflicts. I know the sad truth. Even in the most conservative of fields, the bold declaration of the truth gave the pastor pause. He’s not very old. He has a family and he runs it off the Biblical model. But he didn’t want to push the issue. I might be wrong. The sermon might indeed have been a response to the petty matriarchal in-fighting on the vestry, and letting a truth go untold is less morally evil than telling a lie, but it was a severe disappointment to me.
The hardcore non-catholic protestants (an odd phrase to people who didn’t grow up Anglo-Episcopal) may openly thumb their noses at feminism and the co-equal house, but they still raise their women to value beta males who only “lead” in their narrowly-defined accepted areas such as Bible studies, altar calls, and living a robotic life. And robots are followers at the end of the day. Modern church leadership has proven they’re merely a facet of the people in the fews, telling them what they want to hear. There’s no room in the expectations of the women I’ve encountered for a real human being. They want the facade, the fake 50s illusion. They’ve chosen a castrato man and crowned him king, expecting him to lead. They’ve established a default matriarchy by only deeming safe “churchly” males who never show any non-sanctioned behaviors (crudeness, drinking more than 2 beers in a night, extreme politics, actual love of sex, not just the duty aspect, etc.). They get men who can’t lead as heads-of-household by default. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.
I am sorry, but I couldn’t read past the “Grovel” portion. This is really depressing. IMO the reason marriages, including Christian ones, are so troubled is because of horsefeather advice like this. *shudder* Thanks for the tipoff, of course, but…it’s really depressing to read!
Wait a divorced man is giving advice on marriage a year after the fact (is that the correct timing???)? What on earth is he thinking.
And Karamazov I’ve seen that dodge so many times. A friend of mine (non-androsphere affiliated) was at a bible study group some years back on Ephesians. One of the women quipped that “we’re always talking about the women and never what men need to do.” Fortunately my friend wasn’t keen on that outright lie and pointed out that “we _always_ talk about the men!”
good post.
and lest we forget that a mans default position is in fact slavery. and decent slave masters are in quite short supply.
I still laugh when I listen to the focus on the family download about marital submission where the pastor speaks the truth on some marriage cruise, but the intro done by Dennis totally takes it out of context and says that that it is not what you might think….but when you listen to the message it is exactly what you think if you actually read your bible!
All this advice is so behind the times. It’s like Christian “rock” music. It’s all stuck in the 80s hairband sound; and here we have the old, discredited Oprah tropes from the early 90s repackaged as Christian advice.
It honestly is all a bit sickening. And its just as likely to fail and lead to widespread misery and destruction in Christian circles as it already has in secular society.
@Dalrock the missing KK page was linked from your post here. Would you please link to the transcript?
[D: I think that is the same link I used in Brilliant Advertising. Either way it doesn’t work for me either. Does it work for you?]
My post above (https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95141) has the method to find the transcript.
I laughed. It might be the Newcastle Werewolf, but I laughed.
Steve Arterburn is another church leader advocating Christian men mutually submit to their wives and shower them with romance. He claims it turned his marriage to his second wife around. But after he co-wrote this in “Every Man’s Marriage” he and his second wife divorced. Mutual submission did not work for his second marriage!
“Following this turnaround, as I talked with more husbands and wives, I heard them say that their marriages improved when the husband sought to do things to please his wife—when he began to allow her personality and convictions to find a place with his in the marriage. This is what mutual submission is all about, and that’s the profound, life-changing theme Fred and I will be exploring with you in this book.”
“Every Man’s Marriage” by Steve Arterburn & Fred Stoeker
The ‘Man Up’ and ‘Step Up’ screed isn’t simply hot air from some blaggard, it is a sophisticated form of Social Marketing designed to create compliance through emotional responses inducing fear, guilt or shame.
FEAR, GUILT, AND SHAME APPEALS IN SOCIAL MARKETING
http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/eserv/rmit:10094/n2006022051.pdf
My mom, may,she RIP, used to talk about how my Dad, may he RIP, came back much improved in her eyes from his war-service in the ETO.
Killing people with your bare hands = authentic love from a human female.
Is that what the consiler-dude was trying to say? Or is he less than worthless.
What terrible advice from those people. Clearly not Christian. The authors should be ashamed of themselves but (apparently) they are not. If that Gerald Rogers really believes that crap he wrote about how to keep the marriage going, its no wonder he is now frivorced. I feel sorry for him but he needs to step away from the computer and cease and disist all writing on it immediately.
It’s incredible that someone can write about how they acted like a petulant child, breaking perfectly good possessions in order to get attention, and not see how absurd they were being. There’s a palpable sense of pride — “look how far I was willing to go! Look how dramatic and interesting my situation was!” — that’s ridiculous, not to mention awful for her husband.
It’s such a shame that women aren’t taught to see themselves clearly. If her kid had done that, she’d have scolded the kid and told them how wrong it was and how stupid they were being. But since it was her that was upset, it’s okay. The ability of women to not see their actions from the outside never ceases to amaze me.
The truly infuriating thing about that kind of behavior is that it’s not remotely necessary. Women always think they have to do something crazy and dramatic for their husbands to listen to them, when in reality they haven’t ever told their husbands anything useful. They seem to think that because they’ve been feeling something for a while and their husband hasn’t responded to it, he was ignoring or rejecting her feelings, when in reality she never said anything (or never said anything clearly, that wasn’t cryptic or out of context). If she had just had a conversation that started with “honey, I’ve been feeling unhappy lately, ever since…” then he almost certainly would listen and help her to either recognize that what she’s feeling isn’t real, or deal with whatever issues she’s having. But the conversations actually tend to start with “Why don’t you love me anymore???” or “You never help me with anything!” She starts with an attack, not a request for help.
It’s as though a woman is trying to get some heavy groceries in her car. A man walks by, and she slaps him in the face. He stands there stunned, and she glares at him. Finally she says, “Are you going to help me with these groceries or what???”
If a woman like this would approach her husband as someone who is on her side and will help her against whatever issue she’s having, rather than as someone who’s against her and causing the problem, she would likely find him very helpful and feel closer to him.
“His wife’s brave decision not to honor her marriage vow”
Hahaha, that cracks me up. Great way to parody frame the frame.
If Christians wonder why the church is completely irrelevant, then they have to look no further than pandering to women. It’s the same reason video games are becoming irrelevant, college is irrelevant, the military is becoming irrelevant, marriage has become irrelevant, and so on. It’s baffling that people can’t pick up on the pattern yet.
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“…Kathy got Tim’s attention by lining up some of her good china…”
Remember this men, what is Tim’s is theirs and what is Kathy’s is hers.
The Rain Man Dennis Rain-ey Spell® seems to have been cast on Ryan Seacrest in a “Man Up, Stand Up” routine that’s seriously out of character and against our advice. Listen Here[D: I think that is the same link I used in Brilliant Advertising. Either way it doesn’t work for me either. Does it work for you?] No, it does not work. At FL, they have mind-blowing PR, reputation management and magic in effect. Congratulations Dalrock, you’ve FL and FOTF off guard. They panicked and pulled the pages down.
Ryan Seacrest, on air this morning, in a rare “Man Up, Stand Up” routine. Talk segments on the show usually never this long. Could it be the Dennis Rainey ‘Rain Man’ “Man Up” spell? You be the judge. Listen here.
Good post! When a women makes her man a god in her eyes. He becomes what The Lord intended his sons to be: gods! I made a big boo boo yesterday and was required to write a 500 word essay of why I was to blame and the repercussions of un submission. Haha. Loved it! Because of the of that quote. yes. “behind every great GREAT man IS a submissive and flexible women.”
Think I’m going to post my response. http://www.housewifesexuality.wordpress.com
*because of that quote
D-Rain, Mr. Rogers, and J.R. Lingerfelt (Lingerfelt??).
Are you sure these guys aren’t from that Monty Python skit?
@mrsdarlings
“When a women makes her man a god in her eyes.”
Uh oh. You seem to be treading the dangerous area of idolatry. The image of god but not god.
is man.
If she has a right to choose not to be with her husband at anytime, why we getting married again?
Thank you for your concern. but, No info warrior…not idolatry. it’s belief that my husband will create Anything that the lord hath. We are literally daughters and sons of god. God doesn’t sit their and say that you cannot be me or become like me.
It’s the exact opposite. A parent wants his children to be better than him. IDOLATRY is worshipping something that would remove this privilege from his sons and daughters from copying god and therefore becoming like him. A god. A creator.
Once we get to heaven what then? We don’t sit around. We create! God doesn’t sit on his throne doing nothing. Saying i am god! worship me. he sets the example. He moves, he creates he expands. Which is exactly what we are to do for ourselves. Don’t do for others what they can and ought to do for themselves.
With respect that is why there is hell on earth, because people don’t understand their vast potential as a god or submissive goddess in being able to create heaven on earth. This is a testing ground for god to see if we will believe in our heritage and where we cane from. Take responsibility as a god or submissive goddess and create heaven on earth because he certainly isn’t going to do it for us. Remember that during a test the teacher is quiet. That is how much I believe in people and the potential of men! Forgive me for my passion. But, men are suffering from this lack of belief that is instilled in childhood.
The ultimate solution to wifely unhappiness was known for most of recorded history until the last 50 years… “I’m not HAAAAAAPY!!!!”. “Fine – it’s 25 degrees Fahrenheit outside now and night is coming. When you leave you will want to find an active steam grate to sleep next too and oh the bums and the hobos will probably make a sport of raping you so you might want to get some extra antibiotics and remember to take the pill before you go out there. As husband and head of the house everything inside including the children is mine, period, by biblical standards. I will not divorce you so you may not get married again and if you leave you get nothing”.
The only reason this advice doesn’t work now is the state has gotten involved. There is nothing good, not marriage, not religion, not work, not raising children, not worship, that the state can’t turn to evil and it has. Abracadabra.
“It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.”
From Satan’s mouth to your ears.
What “don’t judge her” was taking a day off that day.
Most of the advice from Christian family organizations is for a husband to be his wife’s best girlfriend.
Who’s in his audience, and who’s buying any of the products he’s selling? Is it men, or is it women?
I can’t think of a better method to market a product than to pander to the demographic in control of 80% of the household income. Providing Christian justification and the endorsement of a self-proclaimed figurehead to a group of women who likely used the same tactics and methods to obtain compliance and marriage to snare their spouses to begin with.
If you want to make money selling beer to men, put a hot chick in the ad. If you want to make money off women, give them an excuse or justification for their desires.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95147
Cail:
Al of that ‘fairness’ talk flies right out the window once the lawyers get to crackin’. I have watched my (now legally ex) wife transform from someone who genuinely grieved at the prospect of the divorce she initiated (shortly after filing) to the most bitter person I’ve yet to meet now that we’ve reach the end of the beginning and she sees the devastation she has wrought.
Regading the ad, there is a firm in my region whose ads sound very similar. I am curious as to what particular expertise they bring to the table vis-a-vis men’s issues as opposed to simple marketing hype.
Eric S. Mueller says:
October 7, 2013 at 7:05 pm
I feel you. Grovelling not only does not work – it makes the problem worse. At best the advice to do so comes from well-meaning but grossly ignorant persons; at worst it comes from people with an agenda.
Been there, done that and now have the 35% salary haircut to prove it.
As a counterpoint to churchian advice, I had to deal with the threatpoint earlier this year. “I don’t want us to get divorced,” my wife would say, when we were fighting but divorce was not being discussed. I realized that she was dipping her toe into the divorce pool, getting herself acclimated to the idea, and would eventually take the plunge once her hamster had gotten up to speed. So I short circuited the process by handing her divorce paperwork and saying, in effect, “You want to get a divorce? Here’s the paperwork. Fill it out, and I’ll file it tomorrow for you.” The shock was enough to snap her out of her stupor, and she has not mentioned it since. While things are still not all that great, they’ve gotten much better.
Of course, to do all this, I had to reach the point where I found nuking the marriage to be an acceptable outcome. Now that I no longer place much value in it, she’s behaving much better than when I was wanting to strengthen it. Lesson learned.
earl says: It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.” From Satan’s mouth to your ears.
It’s the exact opposite of what is found in scripture.
1) It is the husband’s role to change his wife. He is the authority in his home (spiritual and non-spiritual). A husband is to his wife/children as the apostles were to the early churches.
2) A wife has no more authority to correct or control her husband than the church at Ephesians had to correct or control the apostle Paul. A wife is to influence her husband by example–it is a passive style of influence.
“Oh, how unfair to the woman” they cry. Yet, they never think about the tremendous burden this places on the husband’s shoulders. But, at least this way the husband has the authority to make the decisions needed to carry out his responsibility.
The churchians have gutted this concept to the point that it is a facade. The husband’s decisions must be approved by the wife (either implicitly or explicitly), and thus she is the actual authority (the true power behind the throne). But, if the decisions go poorly, the husband is still responsible for the poor outcome.
Husband = responsibility without authority.
Wife = authority without responsibility.
This is the model being taught, and it is 100% unbiblical. Authority and responsibility go together.
It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.
When I first saw this line, it jumped out at me, how wrong it sounded. I would be so much less of a wife and woman now if my husband had left me the way he found me.
He would be so much less of a man and husband had God left him where he was.
Changing for the better is a mark of growth. A husband who cannot help his wife become better is in effect impotent as a husband.
Dennis Rainey, FOTF, etc. These people are largely considered on the front lines of defending “Christian marriage”. If this is what young men are being taught, I fear that it’s time to accept that hope is lost for a turnaround with respect to marriage and the church. The percentage of young men who will run across this sphere its advice (not all of it great but better than most) is so small.
Most of the young men in the church today are being immersed in the doctrine of feminine superiority and innocence. How can they be effective shepherds of their homes under these conditions?
This is a good post Dalrock, but I’m not at all encouraged by it. “Brave decision not to honor her marriage vow…”
Good grief.
This really stood out to me:
“What will it take to get your attention?” In the book The Meaning of Marriage, authors Tim and Kathy Keller relate how Kathy got Tim’s attention by lining up some of her good china, and as soon as Tim walked in the door, breaking it with a hammer. She got his attention!
The reason this caught my eye is because my husband and I attended a Bible study at our church which used the Love and Respect curricula by Emerson Eggerichs, which is actually pretty decent for the most part. In one video segment, a couple described how they decided to participate in Love and Respect; they had gotten into an argument and in a momentary loss of self-control, the husband had thrown a piece of china (I can’t remember if it was a plate or a cup), intending it to hit the wall, but it hit his wife and left a small cut on her cheek. She immediately called the police and he spent a few days in jail.
Contrast that to what happened when Mrs. Keller went on her china-smashing rampage.
Husband throws china: he goes directly to jail.
Wife throws china: she writes a book and makes lots of money
It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.
Let’s think about this for a minute. Forget the notion of a hierarchy, whether based on the Bible or of the “Captain / First Officer” model that Athol has. Take the “mutual submission” model that implies a partnership, something like a small business – how can a partnership function if one partner is not allowed to ever correct behavior of the other partner, no matter how bad the behavior? If Moe and Joe form a business partnership and Moe keeps dipping his hand in the till to buy lunch for himself, and Joe is prohibited from “fixing” or “changing” Moe, what’s going to happen to the business?
What kind of entity need never be changed or fixed? One that is perfect already. What does it mean to assume a priori that women are perfect?
All this advice is so behind the times. It’s like Christian “rock” music. It’s all stuck in the 80s hairband sound; and here we have the old, discredited Oprah tropes from the early 90s repackaged as Christian advice.
That’s what is both so hilarious and so sad about modern churchianity. It’s always trying to co-opt the temporal world in order to spread a (generally faux) Christian message that is “hip to the times” (to misapply a deliberately archaic phrase), but does it so ineptly as to be both ineffective and cause maximum damage.
What terrible advice from those people. Clearly not Christian. The authors should be ashamed of themselves but (apparently) they are not. If that Gerald Rogers really believes that crap he wrote about how to keep the marriage going, its no wonder he is now frivorced.
It’s easy to grow wealthy and influential as a peddler of false teachings when your customer base is not only incapable of critical thought, but is also too lazy to research facts for itself (as in dusting off and opening up the Bible and reading the Word for onself rather than blindly swallowing someone else’s version of it, whole and unquestioningly).
This discussion seems to contradict the old adage: Men marry women with hope they will NEVER change; women marry men with hope that they WILL. change, doesn’t it?
This discussion seems to contradict the old adage: Men marry women with hope they will NEVER change; women marry men with hope that they WILL. change, doesn’t it?
I don’t know if that adage was ever true Jen, although I agree with your comment. It depends on the man, believe me. What my husband loved about me he really loved and still does. But I knew even before I married him that there were areas I was going to have to shape up in. He never hid that, even from the beginning.
I mostly thought my husband aws aewsome the way he was. I wanted him to change in some ways but I also knew that any change that took place was going to be forced on him by me.
Basically, the doctrine of woman as perfectly perfect in every way has turned that adage on its head.
Jen,
Yes, in some ways. It depends on what areas are changing. My understanding of that old adage was that men hope that their wives will be as loving and sweet (maybe as thin, or at least healthy) as they day they met or married and women want to make men over in their own image. But as Elspeth has said, if you truly love and care about someone you want them to be a better person, not in your eyes, but in God’s eyes.
It is amazingly sad how ineffective the church has become. I just heard a sermon about this last week. Too much emphasis on ministry, dress and church activities instead of helping people. And most young people realize this and fall away from the church, especially in college. How do you being to combat such ineffectiveness?
THIS is why I am never getting married, I grew up in a Catholic household but the way women are today isn’t worth it. Women don’t have to stay in a marriage… and I don’t have to marry them, problem solved! The problem is they think it’s all about them but my life doesn’t revolve around making someone else happy. Not my problem
Why is it when it comes to women everything masculine is thrown out the window?
If a man has something that is broke…it is his job to fix it. Not to love it as is. You wouldn’t love your car if you found it with a broken engine and it is sitting on cinder blocks but never do anything to fix it and get it running.
Love is all about action despite the fact you might not be appreciated, supported, encouraged, or acknowledged for it…but you still have to get God’s attention somehow.
So basically these sissified churchian “men” are promoting a timid spirit in men…not what Paul said.
For this reason I remind you to kindle a fresh the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline.
2 Timothy 1:6-10
If the Holy Spirit has anything to do with the FI in it…that is not the Holy Spirit.
Cautiously:
Be careful how much you share. Some who post around these parts don’t like it when men talk about their personal issues. Because, you know, that’s so inappropriate and feminine and childish on a site where intergender relationships are discussed.
./sarc off
For what it’s worth, Keller’s husband Tim is a VERY popular figure in the evangelical/Reformed world. Some jokingly call him the Protestant Pope.
@Elspeth
I don’t have any question that this can be turned around. In the OT there is that amazing story in 2 Kings 22 where the priest in the temple (re)discovered the Book of Law. This astounds me. There was still a temple, and there were still priests, but the book had been ignored so long that it had not only been lost, but it seems that no one knew it had been lost in the first place. That feeling in your gut (and mine) is probably very much like what King Josiah felt when the book was found and read to him. The magnitude of the mistake is profound, yet all we can do is accept the full depth of it so we can repent of it, as Josiah did.
On a more temporal level, I’m also optimistic. Marriage isn’t something we can cast off and still have the gears of society work with any efficiency. The early years of the sexual revolution seemed cost free because we still benefited from the inertia of the old order. But those debts are coming due. Marriage won’t be lost for all, but it will continue to be lost for the lower part of the Socio Economic scale (unless they are faithful to the Bible). But now UMC women are starting to feel the pain of an unraveling marriage market due to their own pushing the limits to their maximum. What I’m getting at is there will be pushback on the secular side as the costs of the dysfunction become more evident. As this happens, and as Game changes popular thinking on the margins, sooner or later Christian leaders are bound to decide to start placing the Bible over feminisim. Once this happens, and others see that God’s plan for men, women, and marriage actually works, more will follow. This could happen in the next few decades or it could take a hundred years or more, but I don’t see how it can’t happen. In the meantime of course, there is a torrent of human suffering; all we can do there is pray and try to help those who will listen to unfashionable truths.
“The problem is they think it’s all about them but my life doesn’t revolve around making someone else happy.”
I’d change that attitude slightly…because your life should revolve around making someone happy.
God for starters…and he sees everything in secret. Men too…they know what other guys have to go through…helping each other with their crosses is how we relate and appreciate one another. Women only see the outer appearances…so that is why they can never appreciate us fully.
That was a serious typographical error. My comment should have read:
“I wanted him to change in some ways but I also knew that any change that took place [in my husband] was not going to be forced on him by me.”
@ Dalrock
“This could happen in the next few decades or it could take a hundred years or more, but I don’t see how it can’t happen. In the meantime of course, there is a torrent of human suffering; all we can do there is pray and try to help those who will listen to unfashionable truths.”
I have to say I agree with Elspeth on this one……….I am not encouraged.
A few decades…….or a few hundred years. The result in my lifetime is a continuation of this assinine feminized (feminist) world.
I expect some sort of economic meltdown soon that may speed the process along. Women loathe to face hard times alone.
And men before us had to go through asinine World Wars and Great Depressions…and before that Civil Wars, bubonic plagues, Dark Ages, famines…civilizations grew and fell apart, etc.
This is the world we live in and the hands we’ve been given. Men better realize that feminism is a spiritual war and the depression is our lives.
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they say that “God loves us too much to let us stay how we are”
and scripture tells us that He is continuously working on our hearts, and rebukes us when needed out of His love for us.
Any man who would not do the same guidiance, leadership, and rebuke for a woman is not loving her well, and regardless of his efforts, she will feel unloved and forsaken… even while she rails that she doesn’t want anyone to change her.
That’s the truth of it. Just as we come to Christ because we know we need Him and we need to get better as individuals, women need a man who will prosper her soul similarly. No one enjoys rebuke, but a man who has enough spine to deliver it to his woman will do well with her.
Gerald Rogers, in his earnest to help marriages, has only piled on the same disastrous advice of the Churchian cathedral does- the same advice that I got when the church failed me and encouraged me to double down on beta behavior.
“Grovel like your marriage and family depend on it, because they do.”
That’s it right there. And it is this message exactly that causes men to refuse to “man up” for the churchian demands, or even to show up at all. Even the clueless dudes know that groveling isn’t good. It’s remarkable that pastors are so mystified about why men don’t show up and marry their sluts, while they dispense advice to be her footstool.
That kool-aid is a hell of a drug…
Decades or hundreds of years? How encouraging. Nothing for it, just have to live in the here and now, do my best to be in the world but not of it.
From one of her articles:
“Our honeymoon phase lasted about nine months. Then arguing ensued. And I was a yeller. I would go into rages that would leave me lying on our bed until I would sob myself to sleep. I felt controlled. I felt trapped. ”
AND
“I read practically every book on marriage ever written. I tried to do all the things I was told to do. But the arguing continued. The drinking would stop and start. The lies would sustain me for awhile. I would cry myself to sleep more nights than I can remember”
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/the-unraveling-of-a-christian-marriage-three-common-questions.html?p=2
Sounds like a borderline disordered woman. The yelling, the feeling of being trapped, the drinking, all hallmarks of a BPD. This poor guy fought for so many years to keep his marriage intact. I am willing to wager that she was very attractive and he married her thinking with his little head as opposed to using his logic and gut instinct.
It is a common theme here, how many men marry the wrong woman based on her looks? The need for external validation overrides the need for a stable and loyal woman. I have dated model looks women and have ended up leaving them, every single time. Because I know the looks only go so far. When I see that they are insecure and needy and core damaged seeking validation elsewhere I run run run for my life.
This message needs to get out there even in the christian circles. Marrying someone based on their exterior beauty but in opposition to the warning signs is a form of idolatry. Idolizing the image of oneself and the image of the beautiful woman. When people stop worshiping their own false self image they will find much more peace in life.
BTW we need somebody to re-enact that Python skit and spoof it to have it be the scenario of the woman breaking plates
“nice family you got here”
We so need that video.
@Hopeful – Stealth Marxism (here I go again) has been very effective in our society. The main targets of denigration have been Men, Marriage and the Church. So, of course the Church is struggling. My opinion is that fluffy Marxists have taken over the leadership of many religious institutions and driven people off with their lack of moral standards. Why go to church to hear the same values espoused by “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”? Boring. Christianity is in the perfect position to be counter-revolutionary, but nobody is seizing this opportunity – yet.
@ Dalrock:
This could happen in the next few decades or it could take a hundred years or more, but I don’t see how it can’t happen.
I realize that things can and most likely will turn eventually; what cannot continue must stop and all that. Of course, I have 3 daughters that I want to mary off in the next 5 years, and two more that I’d like to marry off in the next 15.
A turnaround decades or hundreds of years from now would be great for my grandchildren or great grandchildren. But I’ve got to have some first! And then there’s the fact that a change built on utilitarianism rather than truth is a change that will only last until the good times start rolling again.
That said, I apprecaite your optimism and your ability to see the long view.
Viktor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search For Meaning (1946) that while a person may not be able to control events, he can control how he reacts to them. In the context of this thread, a man may not be able to control his wife, but he can control how he reacts to her. Which must bring up Game – controlling his reaction to her in a leadership or Game fashion will affect her via various paths.
But of course we always see church leadership rejecting Game either explicitly or implicity – teaching anti-Game, in fact. Because that is what the current crop of church leaders learned in their youth, either from their teachers, or from the culture surrounding them or both.
I’ve observed before, in other fora, that the loose collection of righteously angry men more or less making up the Androsphere is counter cultural. Therefore Dalrock is part of the modern counterculture. Does this mean we all have to grow our hair long, start wearing beads, and wearing clothing woven from random pet hair? Or is that too, erm, 70’s?
It seems to me that the best marriage consoling would explain to the woman the realities of divorce on their economic and social lives and tie it to them emotionally. Maybe a video consisting of interviews with middle class women in their late 40s and early 50s who are now estranged from their children, alone, and broke. Toss in a couple dramatizations.
@Elspeth – I am in a similar situation! I have two daughters and a son. I would like them to marry someday and have children. I think it is possible – they just have to be taught to choose wisely!
“5. It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.”
I’m old enough to remember when this was what WOMEN were told regarding their husbands. At least my mother-in-law was wise enough to tell her daughter that as an older man (by ten years) she shouldn’t expect to be able to change me. It has been a long seven years of marriage in some ways, and I know we wouldn’t have made it this far without me disregarding all of the Churchianity advice above. And yes, I am still working to fix my wife because I consider our vows and relationship that important.
Thinking of a friend’s ex-wife who is far past her expiration date… with the grown kids finally starting to turn against her. Not a pretty picture. But much too bitter to admit she ever did anything wrong. No, it’s all on him. Maybe that would be a good video, ask the young ladies, do you want to end up like that?
Problem is, that is not what they see. What they see is…
I get a check from him each month
The kids get to live with me
I get to F-ck whoever I want now
I get to keep the house
And now I can hang out with all my girlfriends who divorced their good for nothing husbands years ago
Worrying about what is in the best interest for the children is a man’s concern. That is why men don’t divorce their lunatic wives when they find out (years after they married them) that they are Bi-Polar or BPD. Worrying about what is in the best interest for the children is NOT a woman’s concern (not if her primary goal is being HAAAAAAPPY which she currently isn’t, so she’ll just DIVORCE him) because women aren’t Moral Agents. You all keep forgetting that.
What makes perfect sense for men because men make decisions based on moral or immoral behavior, does nto apply to women when their deicision tree is merely “Can I or Can’t I?”
Men who have been divorced trying to give marriage and relationship advice…Churchianity figureheads trying to give marriage and relationship advice that’s contrary to the Bible……women breaking possessions to get their husbands to submit…..it just warms my heart to see all this absurdity.
It’s just like the dope smoking hippies at Woodstock that woke up and realized if they could take over education they could brainwash the nation and ruin the country…..that is exactly what’s happened. 5 decades of producing stupid people and look where we are…..you have a stupid fat black woman in cleveland talking about how great the president is because of nothing more than a phone……illegals can practice law in crappafornia, and a geriatric patient who should have been put out to pasture long ago is in control of the Senate.
I’m pretty sure the original lexicons of Feminism realized if they spent enough time beating down men and getting laws passed like VAWA to give them an advantage they could turn marriage dating and relationships totally in their favor. Add in some white knight manginas and the divorce court a$$-raping machine and this is where you end up…….religious charlatains beating down men and worthless women beating them into submission.
I’m sorry Dalrock….but I have to disagree with you. There is no viable, supportable, legitimate reason for this to turn around. More and more men should opt out of marriage. For years Team Vagina has been saying they don’t need men and men are beneath them. Well, I listened. You want to be superior? Good, you can do it alone. You on the side of the road with no cell phone coverage to call AAA because you can’t change your own tire or you ran out of gas, well tough! Not my problem. You feel depressed because you can’t have a life due to the fact there aren’t any babysitters for your thug wombfilth that you spit out all the while complaining there aren’t any good men? Tough! BED! MADE! LIE! You feel life isn’t fair because you have to go out and work since no man will keep you up? Oh well….if you weren’t a nagging, solipsistic, snake in the grass there are plenty of men out there who would be happy to build something meaningful and lasting with you. You lose again Team Vagina.
Good post Dal, but I’m on the back porch with a beer in hand listening to and watching the ocean waters and enjoying the decline. I invite any man out there who has ever been oppressed, told he wasn’t good enough, been a$$-raped by the divorce court machine, been cheated on by his wife, having to support thuglets that aren’t his or has been cuckolded, to come and join me in your own personal paradise that isn’t corrupted by the beasts of the sea!
@Mrs Darling,
With respect that is why there is hell on earth, because people don’t understand their vast potential as a god or submissive goddess in being able to create heaven on earth.
Quite true. Our nature as images as Images of God makes us a very special sort of being. Tolien explores this a bit in one of his short stories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggle
First condo I owned, two doors down the guy that lived there was the homeowner. He moved a couple strippers into his house. For them it was a win because they didn’t have to pay any rent or utilities and they never ate anything anyway, so it freed up all their stripping money for clothes and drugs (and giving their money to their criminal boyfriends for their drugs.)
For him it was a win because he insisted they walked around in the nude all day and he got to have sex with both of them (when they were around, which wasn’t often.) It didn’t cost him anything extra (already had to pay a mortgage and utilities, they never ate food, so…) so
…it was a win-win. And he never worried about being frivorced, they had no legal contract binding any of his assets to them. At any moment he could tell the two of them to leave and never come back and that would be it.
His lifestyle is unChristian but certainly understandable if you reject Christ’s teachings and live a secular life. By all measures he appeared to be a happy person.
@MrsDarlings
I’m ok with your general outlook but your talk of “submissive goddesses” doesn’t fly with me.
Yes, God’s image and all that. But Gods? Goddesses?
Don’t know about that. Last I heard, we were grievous sinners once separated from God and doomed to death. Even as God’s beloved, we are naught more but wretches saved by unmerited favor. Let’s not get too caught up in ‘goddess’ stuff.
The only goddesses in the bible were false and demonic.
@IBB – Do you think women were never moral agents, or do you think that, given the current Marxist feminist indoctrination aimed at them, they are not moral agents?
I don’t think the lack of female moral agency has anything to do with feminism. I think this is just a matter of men and women being different.
It’s like this Jen, you walk around an office and you see a team of young people (all under 30) who all earn about the same amount of money, say $50K. Assume each person is single and childless. The men on this team are usually homeowners. They drive crappy cars. They bring their lunch (and eat dinner at home, PBJ.) They might even be moonlighting at another job at night (if for no other reason than to pay for their “dates.”) The women? Not so much. They live check-to-check, drive real fancy cars, rent nice apartments, eat lunch out every day, have NO money in the bank (but pleanty of debt on their credit cards), and can’t seem to work more than 35 hours a week (forget a second job.) And on the weekends, their boyfriends always pay, they never pay, they never have any money. Forget about saving for a condo downpayment, WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
The men could live like the women, but they don’t. They could but they see that lifestyle as immoral. The women live like that simply because THEY CAN. It is a matter of can I or can’t I. This is what I have seen over 20 years of working with men and women professionally.
Obviously NAWALT, but most are. And I don’t think this has anything to do with feminism (as I still do not see women splitting the check.) No, this is just men and women being different and looking at the world vastly different.
I know it may not be “au fait”with the gist of the conversation here but I have lived for 77 years
and ,quite honestly,I have never known,seen or heard about any marriage which deigned to honour the husband,it has always been about women.When was the last time a man chose the house they live in,the wallpaper,every facet of the house,who decides what,how and where they eat and spend their money on,every last important choice has always been made by the wife,or
female partner.It is men who have given up their authority who are at fault for the present
situation and the church is also shown who is the boss.If the woman doesn’t want to go to church
then nobody goes to church.The only difference between now and say,60 years ago is that the male used to be the titular head of the house,now it is the wife.
The law,we know is an ass and is entirely in the wives corner,it always was,but the punishments
were never as severe and it will be impossible to change unless the male changes and starts
an authoritative bid to impose his will on those areas he has always let his wife decide on.If he can
wrest some control from her then it is possible that the people who actually hold his life in thrall,like large companies may see him as a force again and gradually things will change.Meanwhile you guys have to do what you have to do,but,with no control over anything,the powers that be don’t even see you.
IBB, the guy who lived with the two strippers wasn’t considered about STD’s?
Oops, I mean concerned. Sorry.
@Hopeful – I’d be more concerned about having the condo cleaned out while he was out for more than a couple of hours. Well, no. I’d be most concerned about STDs. But still.
Causiously, good point.
I think a drop card “campaign” could work – a few lines of text and a link to a starter page that eases the reader into the ‘sphere. Just hand them to people or drop them in the pews. I would opt for a style like many other awareness campaigns. Since the subset of people who are involved is quite small, guerrilla marketing is a good way to expand it.
* Bonus: “What will it take to get your attention?”
How about not creating a high drama unsafe ambush situation for the man giving up his energy, time, and life to provide food, shelter, and clothing for you? Especially if you dress and wear your hair more for your girlfriends than for your man. There are 1000 good things* a woman can do, but “oddly” those are the exact things soft and hard feminisms tell women to never do. It’s almost as if they don’t want marriages to work. Has anyone else ever noticed or remarked on that? 😉
* For example, she wants attention, she should first be the safest person in his life. He walks in the door from giving up his life providing for them, this should be the best moment of the day for him – like baseball, when he reaches home and he’s safe and he scores. Like football, after battling against all opposition to cross the goal line, once in the end zone no one can oppose him, it’s just time to celebrate, dance and revel in another success. The woman that provides that doesn’t lack positive attention, unlike the unsafe and poisonous drama queen ambushing her man and breaking china as he comes in the door.
Cleaned out? For this guy that would have been the best thing since he has absolutely NOTHING of value in his home. If the girls had cleaned him out, they basically would have been taking all the trash out of his place. (I think he color TV was from the 1980s!) None of the furniture was new, all freebie hand-me-downs that nobody wanted.
STDs? Sure, I’m sure was concerned about that and I’m guessing he used condoms.
“Behind every successful man is a strong woman.”
The twist on this I have been hearing is is that “behind every successful man is a submissive woman”. That submission causes men to “step up”. This is the tradcon way of not sounding as feminist by saying women are “strong”, but it means the same thing. Point is women are to take the initiative, in their almighty morally superior power, to make men do something–they are acting to make men react–this is leading–women are the ones leading and holding the leash.
“What males need—what your husband needs—is a wife who believes in him, encourages him, and helps him step up to become the man God created him to be.”
Yes,because women already come neatly out of the box with all the skills to be the “woman God created her to be”. Ya–sure! To encourage and believe in her man is one thing, but he needs to be a man first on his own initiative. A woman cannot make a man, only feminized men. This is exactly what the churchians have been pumping out and then the women don’t get how their mighty submission/strength was not enough. They think their being female is the magic wand to all problems.
Solomon,
“That’s the truth of it. Just as we come to Christ because we know we need Him and we need to get better as individuals, women need a man who will prosper her soul similarly. No one enjoys rebuke, but a man who has enough spine to deliver it to his woman will do well with her.”
I like that. Part of her submission is realizing that she needs to improve herself and she hopes he can guide her along in that. Tricky part is getting women to realize submission is not a tool to craft men. It is to humble their hearts so they are pacified enough for accepting rebukes and corrections without having a hissy fit. Submission tempers a woman, but the hard part is getting her to accept being tempered and cultivating a submissive spirit.
@IBB
And that is part of why marriage is broken before it begins. I can stomach dating those women. Hoping I’ve misread. Hoping they are on the verge of a breakthrough. For a while. But then when the natural progression kicks in and I realize that marriage to a woman like that is basically selling a 60% interest in my life’s work, my net worth that came via great discipline and sacrifice, as well as a doubling-down of my future obligations as a provider to a woman with a $6 coffee in one hand and the other on the ripcord, and the contractual extension of that mindset becomes unappealing quite quickly. Next.
The pool of 32 y/o women with $30-$50k in debt and a masters in something feelie with no savings and a penchant for sushi and tropical vacations, fresh off a 20-year ride on men who would not marry her – but she was ok with that because she was “finding herself” is so very, very deep. NAWALT for sure – I’ve found a few, but it takes a lot of digging and Game and plain old work to get them off script enough to find some resemblance of a moral compass.
And I’ve given up entirely on the church women. At least the faux spirituality of the hedonistic yoga-chick culture provides for transparency. I’ll take on a misguided woman with some distant notion of Budda as opposed to a woman entrenched in the schizophrenic machinations of perverted Christian entitlement.
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“behind every successful man is a submissive woman” – I think this points more to a woman’s ability to cripple a man or her ability to inspire a man than her “ability” to lead (or force) a man to success. Disorder leads to ruin. A disordered marriage cannot produce the “fruits” an ordered one can.
In addition, a one sheet “flyer” with similar information can be placed on the windshields of all the vehicles in the church parking lot. That’s what happen in my church (I no longer attend) when a message had to be delivered to the congregation, but was not forthcoming from the pulpit. It was very effective.
nice post dalrockaz!!
hey if you don’t publish a book soon, i am going to buy glen snatnton’s!! lzolzlzlzlz
just kiddingz!!!
da neoeocnths rewrote:
“behind every successful man is a submissive woman”
as
“behind every successful women der is is a submissive man buttcockingz herz and paying her bills, obeying and serving all her butt and gina tinzgzlzlozlzo as the pua community teaches men to do lzizzlzlizzlzooz”
@IBB
You are taking the hamster at its word. I covered this in detail in a couple of posts a while back, but her status drops like a rock unless she can remarry, and remarry well. Those girlfriends who “divorced their good for nothing husbands years ago” are also at the bottom of the status totem pole. This isn’t a celebration of champions, this is the kids who didn’t get picked for the team all sitting on the same bench together claiming they are lucky they didn’t get picked. If they could have remarried a decent man they would have done so. They all pulled the same Hold my beer and watch this! stunt, and it failed miserably for all of them. Those few women who managed to pull off the unlikely trick are now remarried to a decent status man and won’t be hanging out with the divorcées, thank you.
If you want to test this out, the next time you encounter a woman who is toying with divorce empowerment ask her what she expects after divorce. After she finishes regaling you with tales of logic defying magically better options, ask her about the women in her circle who already divorced. She will start by telling you about the latest book she read or movie or TV show she saw, even if she isn’t clear about this in her own mind. So the key thing is to help her focus on real people she knows. A friend of a friend or a fictional character don’t count. Neither do gossip magazine stories or the boasts made by other women prior to or just after divorce. It will be very difficult, but keep steering her back to real people she actually knows (friends, neighbors, coworkers, relatives), and real events she knows actually happened. So the gals at the office who all swear they have doctors and lawyers dumping their supermodel girlfriends and kneeling down to propose marriage don’t count, unless said doctor/lawyer actually shows up at social gatherings and can be seen as the real deal. If you ever manage to pierce her veil of unrealistic expectations, you will find that nine times out of ten she suddenly loses interest in the idea of divorce (He finally changed!). She very likely will go home and bake her husband a cake.
Laszlo,
Certainly understandable.
Yes, no-fault-divorce laws really screwed up marriage (particularly Christian marriage) in Western Civilization. Most of the protections and incentives that were built in for both parties were stripped away and (because of the way society looks at men and women NOT being equals) new incentives were built in for women. Not much there for men anymore. And if you mention this to a White Knight, he’ll just give you “the look” without saying anything (because he knows that nothing he will say will matter in the world of reality) and your no-nonsense response on why marriage just isn’t everything that it is cracked up to be, will just anger him.
I really feel sorry for young people. Their priorities are all screwed up, really. Women are focused on “finding themselves” when what they should be doing is “finding a man that loves and cherishes them” and men are too focused on trying to please any woman who gives them the time of day (no matter how many obsticles she places in his path to shit test him.)
@theshadowedknight
“”It truly is incredible how well a sales job they do””
I agree…….as I am someone that has listened to all the motivational speakers and top sellers.
“”It is not like he knows how well he sells the life of a bachelor compared to that of a husband.””
This what I see also.What an interesting irony.All the sales talk about marriage and he makes a man want to stay single…L* If this guy was selling SUV’s….I would be more inclined to take the bus!
“His lifestyle is unChristian but certainly understandable if you reject Christ’s teachings and live a secular life. By all measures he appeared to be a happy person.”
Yeah but the stories I’ve heard about strippers going all crazy…even if you aren’t married to them that still doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
Dalrock said … sooner or later Christian leaders are bound to decide to start placing the Bible over feminisim.
Let us hope and pray so, but honestly I don’t see this happening without a spiritual version of a massive Stalinist-style purge within the faith (to use an admittedly inappropriate metaphor). Simply too much spiritual gangrene has seeped into the current order and it is so far advanced that recovery is unlikely.
Dalrock,
Absolutely NOT, NO! I don’t know where you could have gotten that idea. You need to unlearn that which you have learned. You must not know very many women who are divorced (least of all women who are getting the cash and prizes.) Unfortunately, I know way too many and I learned from Their behavior.
They do NOT care what society thinks of them. They care about the house they have (that they don’t have to pay for), the check they get each month (from the beta male they no longer have to f-ck) and the alpha male stud who moved INTO the house they are now f-cking (but would never marry.) And they have ALL THE POWER since if he doesnt’ perform, she’ll kick him out and he’ll have to find another Cougar to live with. That takes time and work. These alpha guys don’t want to work.
Problem with this scientific experiment Dalrock (what I think you are missing) is that the women who are actually serious about the divorce empowerment, they don’t show their poker hand. They don’t typically talk about wanting out and then show any kind of interest in thinking things through. They don’t simply because they don’t want their soon to be ex-husbands to have access to that information because they might try and protect themsleves in some way. Never-EVER give them that kind of information. He finds out (for the first time) when he comes home, sees a note on the kitchen table about her lawyer and the court date OR (if she doesn’t want to move out) the police at the door to escort him off the property because she got a restraining order. THAT Dalrock is Divorce.
So for me, there will be no one to ask.
Remember the primary goal for the divorce is to make her happy and (quite often) her happiness is completely and totally at his expense. He is making HER WHOLE on her happiness by being absent while still supporting her. To her, that is happy. That is STATUS, a true win-win.
Forget about Eat-Pray-Love. She has been married and probably had the kids. Now she has the checks and the house. She is not going to get married again unless she is SERIOUSLY trading up in earning power. She already has no real fear of the Lake of Fire for what she’s done, she certainly isn’t Christian. So of course, all she needs now is a dildo or some stud around to f-ck every once in a while. Beyond that, she’s got it all…
I think you might need to start setting up some divorced women “categories” because you are leaving out way too many variables.
As I’ve already discussed, for me this discussion never happens. You don’t have this conversation with the soon-to-be divorced lady BEFORE she divorces. For me, its always been after. And I have these conversations after, all the time. And I’ll tell you, the only ones who truly worry about the “status lost” by being divorced, these are the ones who are divorced three or four times.
Dalrock, I think your “status lost” theory for divorced women, we are talking about a very small percentage of divorced women, the ones who get married and divorced multiple times. That’s it man. I have a co-worker, she is divorced 4 times. And in each situation, she did the divorcing and she is always smiling. I don’t know if she is happy on the inside but she does tell me that she was happiest when she was married. But that she chose to marry four men who all cheated on her and with each divorce, it just gets a little bit easier.
Well, I admired Tim Keller. Their books make me come back to Christianity. Now, not so much. His wife’s breaking china in order to get his attention and he allowing it? Such a pussy.
@tz2026
“”Hello 911? Police? My wife has gone crazy is armed with a hammer and is smashing things! You need to send the police, and a psychatric intervention team before she destroys the place or hurts someone!””
The cops show up……..and who do you think that those schmoes are going to arrest?…….YOU!
Two things occurred to me about this post. The first is that when I was on holiday in New York, I visited the Redeemer Presbyterian Church, whose senior pastor is one Timothy Keller. Other than the ushers directing us to the 5th floor, no-one in the church could be bothered to even speak to the visitors. Sounds like a great example on relationships for someone who wants to be seen as the husband of a relationship expert.
The second is the that I have been looking at “Men’s League” (mensleague.org) which goes back to the discipleship concept. What strikes me is that this works on the principle of men leading men closer to Christ, and men leading their families, including their wives, spiritually. Except for the fact that the group does not meet in a formal church setting, it sounds much like what Joseph of Jackson has done with his group of men. Perhaps if anyone has tried this set-up they would like to let me know.
@feeriker
“”It’s easy to grow wealthy and influential as a peddler of false teachings when your customer base is not only incapable of critical thought, but is also too lazy to research facts for itself””
This really struck out at me while I was reading posts on Dalrock’s latest article(Which is great!)
As an Orthodox Jew I would like to explain my favorite “Christians” to you…concerning the “customer base” which you speak of. The “Moonies” led by the Reverend Moon…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon………….I used to see his disciples at the Toronto Pearson International Airport selling flowers and trying to recruit people.This Korean Moron has grown wealthy as a “peddler of FALSE TEACHINGS”……and people follow him and believe him to be the “MESSIAH”??????…..L* No offense my Christian friend…..but,I am not a Christian and never have been …….nor will ever be a Christian …….and the more “Christian Teachings” that I read from useless clusterf***s like Rainey the more I am happy and DAMN proud to be Orthodox Jewish!……..Shalom!
@MarkyMark
Hello to you my friend!…….Long time NO POST? It is nice to see you again! I hope things are going well for yourself!
“”THIS is why I am never getting married, I grew up in a Catholic household but the way women are today isn’t worth it. Women don’t have to stay in a marriage… and I don’t have to marry them, problem solved! The problem is they think it’s all about them but my life doesn’t revolve around making someone else happy. Not my problem””
Truer words have never been spoken!……and don’t be a stranger!………..Shalom!
@Patriot
“”For years Team Vagina has been saying they don’t need men and men are beneath them. Well, I listened.””
Me also my friend!………..and I thank GOD everyday for that!…….Shalom!
@IBB
“”October 8, 2013 at 3:16 pm””
Best post on this thread!………..you know what the SCORE is!…….keep up the GREAT posts and educating other men via your experiences!……..it will return to you “ten-fold”……….^5’s my friend!…..Shalom!
Re: Financial literacy and gender: http://simulacral-legendarium.blogspot.ca/2013/10/finance-and-gender.html
Thank you Mark.
Men can’t afford to discuss rainbows and unicorns, not when it is their livelihood and careers at stake. Divorce is real life, not Eat Pray Love. Men need to understand how this really happens and although I’ve known quite a few women who talked about divorcing their husbands, those that talked about it ahead of time never did it. They were never really serious. They just liked talking about it to make themselves feel better because they were angry at the moment.
All the actual divorces, it was always a command decision on her part and there wasn’t anything any third party could do or say that could change her mind. She wanted it, it was going to happen. End of story. And although I’ve known quite a few women who weren’t happy following the divorce and NONE that traded-up in marriage (Eat Pray Love), I haven’t known any that worried about their “status.” We don’t shame anymore, least of all women shaming other women because of selfishness of their silly frivorce. It certainly doesn’t happen in church. And if it doesn’t happen there, it doesn’t happen anywhere.
@IBB,
Sure thing Dalrock is ignorant. Sure thing. AMOG more.
@Solomon,
Don’t know about that. Last I heard, we were grievous sinners once separated from God and doomed to death. Even as God’s beloved, we are naught more but wretches saved by unmerited favor. Let’s not get too caught up in ‘goddess’ stuff.
We are and we are also images of the True God who he calls into a more prefect life with His Being. He calls us gods (small “g”) directly and there is plenty of classical theology that developed this idea. From Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”:
GK,
No he is NOT. I can’t imagine where you could have gotten that idea. Dalrock is brilliant, very well informed. He has an abundance of wisdom, his site is citicial for many men. I just disagree with him (completely and totally) on one or two things and explained why. Everything else, I’m his biggest advocate.
Something to keep an eye on:
Pope Francis calls extraordinary synod for only third time in modern Church history
Looks like the new liberal pope may be set to loosen the restrictions on Catholic annulment, divorce, and remarriage.
@IBB,
Absolutely NOT, NO! I don’t know where you could have gotten that idea. You need to unlearn that which you have learned. You must not know very many women who are divorced (least of all women who are getting the cash and prizes.) Unfortunately, I know way too many and I learned from Their behavior.
Sure. Because when a guy writes for years about this he must “unlearn”. This is you calling him ignorant with very little to back it up.
I don’t care what you call it.
IBB, very little you said contradicted Dalrock at all. You focused on the status lost, and he was talking about the practical difference between the fantasy of divorce and the reality. Yes, some women do live large after divorce with a nice house and a series of hunky boyfriends or a good husband #2, but they’re a small minority. (And as he said, the ones who remarry don’t want to hang around with the ones that haven’t.) The post-divorce reality for most, even with the cash and prizes, is much less pleasant and exciting than the fantasy. So Dalrock was saying that IF you can get them to look objectively (a big IF, as he said) at the real-life circumstances of their post-divorce friends, they may be able to see that a poorly maintained house or small apartment with cats and unmanageable kids is a lot more likely than daily shopping sprees in between ski trips with a new boyfriend with an exotic accent.
He’s right because of what you said: women going through divorce become extremely mercenary, even if they weren’t at first. I’ve seen women start out honestly just wanting out and thinking they’ll be nice about it, but after they think about it a while and some friends and family chime in, they decide they “deserve” to squeeze him for everything they can. She may not care about the status loss, but she damn sure cares what kind of lifestyle she’ll be able to maintain. When someone’s that focused on the bottom line, if you can get her to set aside the fantasy long enough to see that the bottom line isn’t as rosy as she imagined, she might think twice. Again, convincing them to open their eyes to reality is the hard part.
Sure, many divorced women will tell you it’s awesome. Look them in the eye as they say it, and see if you can spot the fear and desperation. Check back with them after a few years. If they remarried, compare the new husband to the old one, and see if she traded up like she hoped, or if she ended up settling for a guy who ranks well below the one she split from. If she has a boyfriend, ask who’s pushing for marriage (she is) and who’s holding out because he’s already getting what he wants and figures he might do better (he is). Those women who have an unemployed boyfriend living with them and mooching off them — do you think that’s the way those women want it? Is that what they imagined when they filed the divorce papers? Not hardly.
michael savell says:
October 8, 2013 at 1:20 pm
>>When was the last time a man chose the house they live in,the wallpaper,every facet of the house,who decides what,how and where they eat and spend their money on
My son-in-law.
>>It is men who have given up their authority who are at fault for the present
situation
Man-fault? Men have had their authority taken away from them. Those who try to keep it are called ex-husbands. Or, perhaps cadavers if the SWAT team was called in.
>>it will be impossible to change unless the male changes and starts
an authoritative bid to impose his will on those areas he has always let his wife decide on
Men who “impose” their wills soon enough are staring down the barrels of SWAT team rifles. Please stop this nonsensical man-fault talk.
Cail,
I focused on the status because there is my point of greatest disagreement with Dalrock. Status would matter if it would (in someway) motive women NOT to divorce.
I’m saying it doesn’t. I don’t care if Dalrock thinks otherwise. On this one point, I say he’s wrong. Everything else he could be right.
Maybe some have told you that. NONE have told me that. What they’ve told me is that (in their mind) they tried to make it work, failed, realized that there was nothing they could do to be happy if they stayed with him, so they opted for the divorced life over the married one. All the divorced women that I know, divorced with the belief that they would never remarry.
They were okay with this. That is how miserable they were in their marriage, they would rather live the rest of their life on this planet in an empty bed, than share even one minute with him. The fact that they get made whole financially makes that decision all the easier. BUT that financial empowerment is only temporary (temporary as they LOSE IT the moment they remarry.) So there is (in some cases, the cases where she actually gets a continuous flow of money) a financial incentive on HER part to remain divorced.
The ones that DO remarry (and divorce, and divorce again, like J-Lo) do so because each divorce becomes progressively easier. Happiness is all that is important to them IN the marriage since they know that they can leave it at anytime and it doesn’t really matter. But in these cases, the ones who have been married multiple times, she didn’t get all the cash and prizes from #1. She may have gained no alimony, no house, no wealth at all, so OF COURSE re-marry because she doesn’t have anything to lose by remarrying.
They remarry ONLY when it benefits financially. They will take in boyfriends and live with them (in sin) so long as the checks keep coming in….. seems cold, but it is entirely logical given happiness is the primary motivation.
@GKC and CC
Good luck with InnocentHelenKellerBoston. He still doesn’t know what “moral agency” is.
Gosh, how can he learn? If only there were some resource where he could learn these things. This is a crazy idea, but maybe if there was some kind of–I don’t know–a vast network of information…
Mrs. Rainey says “When you married your husband, he was unsure of himself as a man and was unskilled as a husband.”
However, does it ever occur to Mrs. Rainey that a good amount of women out there are fickle and will be entering the marriage unskilled as wife?
Not all men out there are broken….
Unlikely. Pope Francis worries me in some ways, but in this area, it’s not like he could make things a lot worse. The annulment process in many dioceses is nearly a rubber stamp, and there is almost total ignorance about what it means. After Vatican II, the Church stopped teaching Catholics the doctrine on marriage and stopped discouraging marriage to non-Catholics, which gave us a couple generations of people who got into marital messes without knowing what they were doing.
Now many of those are coming back to the Church, perhaps with children they want baptized in the faith, and they have to be handled somehow. The rules on annulment take for granted rules on the indissolubility of marriage that were largely forgotten. The doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage can’t be changed, so the annulment process and marriage education have to be fixed, and dioceses have to be stopped from doing their own thing and ignoring the rules. In the meantime, people who got caught in the tide of ignorance must be treated with compassion without violating the rules.
I’m not saying I’m confident that that’s what will happen. But any clarification of the standards would be good, and that doesn’t seem like too much to hope for. The most likely other possibility is that they’ll have lots of meetings and produce a document with a lot of technical and flowery language that pretty much says what had already been said more clearly by past documents, which people can then pore over to try to find loopholes. (That’s what happened with the new catechism, which was entirely unnecessary and was authorized by one of the last synods.)
Yes, Pope Francis is a liberal compared to, say, Pope St. Pius V, but people (including nearly all journalists) who hear “liberal” and think he’s suddenly going to come out for gay marriage or women priests are looking at the Church through the filter of American politics, which just doesn’t fit.
“All the divorced women that I know, divorced with the belief that they would never remarry…That is how miserable they were in their marriage.”
That has pretty much been my experience talking with divorced women, also. I am not sure if I just encountered ones who happened to marry nutcases or if our current culture imbues some women with very unrealistic expectations of marriage….
I read all about the suposed benfits of married life for men like behind every successfull man is a good woman and married men are healthier yet I look around and can only concluded they are lairs.
Why is it the most overtly devote men pimp the femimine imperative and advocate for the ruination of men the hardest?
Remember the old warning given to men, Marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. – Oscar Wilde
Thanks, MD. Oscar Wilde said it even better than I remembered.
@IBB
“”I’ve known quite a few women who weren’t happy following the divorce and NONE that traded-up in marriage (Eat Pray Love), I haven’t known any that worried about their “status.” “”
My sister! She divorced the best guy that she will ever meet.Her problem was(and always will be) that he was not making enough money.He worked his nuts off for her but,he was still not the “Wealthy Jew” that she wanted.She was and is always worried about her “status”.That was 7 years ago.She is still single,never dates and is always looking.She has asked me many times to introduce her to some of my wealthy friends.I always say “NO” because,I know what she is up to.I have had a few of my friends ask about my sister and I have told them point blank…”RUN….don’t even think about it…..she will spend you broke in less than a year”….They get the point and fortunately for them they took my advice!
Offtopic. But relevant. The anatomy of female power must read:
http://www.therawness.com/AFP.pdf
Pingback: Lightning Round – 2013/10/09 | Free Northerner
My sister! She divorced the best guy that she will ever meet.Her problem was(and always will be) that he was not making enough money.He worked his nuts off for her but,he was still not the “Wealthy Jew” that she wanted.She was and is always worried about her “status”.That was 7 years ago.She is still single,never dates and is always looking.
This seems to illustrate what a friend of mine (his father was Jewish, his mother a Gentile) told me several years ago in casual conversation that his father said when he once asked his dad why he never married a Jewish woman. He said his dad’s response was basically “Son, I would NEVER have done that to you and your sister, but more importantly, I would never have done that to MYSELF either – not on a bet.”
“Why is it the most overtly devote men pimp the femimine imperative and advocate for the ruination of men the hardest?”
Being devote doesn’t mean they still aren’t blind…or are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95259
Dal,
I’m not sure that you could get much from demanding that the budding frivorcer rigorously examine the outcomes being realized by her cohort of other divorcees if only due to the likelihood that there in the same general age bracket and as such have not yet really begun to experience the decline that will eventually set in and/or are maintaining (or attempting to maintain) their pre-divorce lifestyle. Further, I don’t think many would be moved by the tales of those who have reached the point in life where the gravity of their decision hits home, even if you could get those living those lives to come clean.
On the latter point, I can’t escape the notion that whereas men who’ve experienced a regrettable divorce would shout from the rooftops to all who’d listen as to the perils of marriage (not just warnings not to do it, but advice as to how to maintain it once tethered), the typical woman would willingly lead her sisters down the path to misery?
@Cail,
Let’s not forget about the lawyers who advise women of their “rights” and about litigation risk to get their husband to settle, etc. The lawyers have much more influence than friends and family.
http://www.thecourier.com/Issues/2013/Oct/08/ar_news_100813_story2.asp?d=100813_story2,2013,Oct,08&c=n
Lol, I laughed, I wonder though.. if you’re dead, you surely cannot kill a judge, right? Maybe the judge should think about that before saying an alive person is still dead…
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95282
It is difficult to believe that the US tribunals could become any more lax with respect to upholding the sanctity of marriage.
“Well, I admired Tim Keller. Their books make me come back to Christianity. Now, not so much. His wife’s breaking china in order to get his attention and he allowing it? Such a pussy.”
Well, if you brought you back to Christianity, that’s the most important thing. There are areas where I disagree with him (feminism/marriage for one), but I don’t question his faith. Don’t go the extreme route of making the “red pill” the litmus test for orthodoxy. At best, you’ll have misplaced priorities; at worst, you’ll end up as part of a monomaniacal cult.
You’re doing the Lords work Dalrock.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95306
Cail’s comment is absolutely spot on about the hardening of hearts. And yes, the lawyers do nothing but exacerbate that.
@Hurting
The reason the approach is effective (when you can get them to look at reality) is they are in the grips of a fantasy that they can divorce and trade up. Shatter that fantasy by helping them see the reality all around them, and the motive for divorce goes away. But they are very resistant to shattering the fantasy, which is why it is so difficult to get them to focus on reality and not fantasy. The way you can tell you succeeded by the way isn’t typically the aspiring frivorcée saying “You are right. I can’t possibly hope to replace my husband with a better man!” The vast majority of the time success will be signaled by a seething hatred of you for somehow rigging the world against her, accompanied by radio silence. Then after a while the whole thing is simply forgotten, and she never really wanted to divorce anyway.
I’m not sure I am following. Are you asking if women would be willing to lead other women into misery? If so, the answer is a resounding yes. Women’s solidarity is confusing because there absolutely is such a thing as Team Woman, but it is simultaneous to an often vicious intra-sexual status competition. Making this harder to recognize is the vicious side is purposely masked as something else to avoid judgment, especially judgment from men. Not all that seems like sweetness from one woman to another is actually sweet.
Women are loyal to women in the abstract, but tend to be covertly brutal to other women in specific. Men tend to be just the opposite. We are more than happy to throw other men in abstract under the bus (which is why we have laws like VAWA), while we are generally very loyal to the men we know personally. Women tend to have frenemies, men don’t.
Dalrock,
Thought you and your readers might be interested in my latest post,
White Women’s Marriage Rates Dropping Much Faster Than Men’s
http://www.justfourguys.com/womens-marriage-rates-dropping-faster-than-mens/
I basically do a repeat for men of your post on white women’s never-married rates and then calculate the 5-year marriage rate for men and compare it with the rate for women.
One of the fascinating things is that
[D: Fascinating. Thanks for sharing the link.]
I’m struggling to understand something, Dalrock. I understand trying to save marriages from frivorce, however, what I’m not able to understand is why a man would intentionally go out of his way to save his marriage to a woman who obviously doesn’t really want him in any shape or form.. Even if it is other men telling such a woman, who is considering frivorce from her husband, that she is not going to be better off and that she is really stuck with her detestable husband or being single for life; what exactly are the reasons for this? To save the marriage, the children, the sanctity of marriage? I’m wondering whether there is a point in time when such a woman, who is considering this ideal, is beyond the point of trying to save. As such, there’s a disconnect for me, as I find the only things worth saving are those same things that people, i.e. the frivorcing woman in this case, would not so easily use as a threat point. If your wife can so easily be moved to use your marriage as a threat point, kids included; she was, as it stands, a really, really bad choice for marriage.
There’s is something terribly wrong when your supposed companion for life would throw you and your marriage; and any children, under the bus for what appears as nothing more than a fantasy. Is such a woman worth saving?
Perhaps the overriding reason is that divorce itself is such a bad outcome for a man that it is better for him to try to save a marriage even when he actually isn’t wanted at all but treated with contempt.
There’s is something terribly wrong when your supposed companion for life would throw you and your marriage; and any children, under the bus for what appears as nothing more than a fantasy. Is such a woman worth saving?
Perhaps the overriding reason is that divorce itself is such a bad outcome for a man that it is better for him to try to save a marriage even when he actually isn’t wanted at all but treated with contempt.
From a purely legal standpoint, this is absolutely true. Given what the outcome of divorce is for most men (i.e., loss of almost all property and money, loss of children to the ex-wife, accompanied by parental alienation; and ceaseless persecution by the family courts), most men are, to use an ancient metaphor, caught between Scylla and Charybdis (or, to use a perhaps more apt metaphor, the frying pan and the flame). Trying to save the marriage and stay with the wife, no matter how unbearable she is to be within several hundred miles of, is, however awful, better than the alternative.
“what I’m not able to understand is why a man would intentionally go out of his way to save his marriage to a woman who obviously doesn’t really want him in any shape or form.”
This part really stuck out to me along with feeriker’s response. I think your question is a good one. However, are you basing the idea of “a woman who obviously doesn’t really want him” on the woman’s speech or actions? Cuz you know, women change their minds all the time. Just because she hates you for a few hours (or days, or years) doesn’t mean she always will. I guess the guy could hold out for this. But then if the guy is going to believe that, then what goes up must come down, and she could once again turn to hating him. I’ve never been married, but hoping to be, so trying not to sound too cynical here (and having some bad karma haunt me), but isn’t that the typical ups and downs of marriage?
hello dalrock! yes i was just going to share the link just four guys shared with stats supporting your basic views.
also i just wrote a new GBFM poem in honor of it and of heartiste’s post today too about how da government shutdown is a boon for betasz!
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/government-shutdown-a-boon-for-beta-males/#comment-485317
lzozozlozlzoz
hey heartsietztz!! hearrsteeitz!!!!
in honor of da government shutdownz being good for betasz, i penned some additionlal eversez verses!!
“EVER SINCE DA GOBBERMENT BEEN SHUTDOWN
IN PUSSY DA BETA DOTH DROWN zlzozlzozo”
i’m a beta a beta herb tool
and now i be getting da pussysys every night
once upon a time da ladies played me 4 a fool
but now i am da masta beta who cashes in on their plight.
now i get me pussy at least once a week
just as long as i pay da billz
for her bastard kidsz her little fleet
i buy dem food and her pussy i get to drillz
i getz to drill it once a month
as is my divine right in our holy matrimony
it isn’t quite as tight as it was once
back when she was buttexed by bernanke zlozozoz
i getz me some pussyies now at least once a year
a dry, wrinkled pusysys which pumped out five kidz form five fatherz
a pussysy dat once held a dozenz cockasz dear
during thosez college weekendz filming porn vidz with tattooed llzlzozolerz
but hail me da beta hero who answered bill bennet’s call
i done manned up like kay hyowitz titsz commanded
and as da american empire doth fall doth fall
i loyally serve my bastard kidz and bernankified wife
and give them everything they demandeth
and jesus christ da chruciansz jesusth smileth upon me
as the meek shall surely inherit the earth
da tattooed loserz got her young thin hot tight for free
while i pay just to smell her bernankifed-std’d girth
lzozozozozzolzlzoz
@Feminist Hater
Yes.
This kind of treachery is without question extremely ugly. Leaving aside the spiritual question of are the wretched worth saving, from a temporal perspective you are assuming the only option is for the woman to continue to treat her husband with contempt. But the root of her contempt was her nurturing the (fantastic) idea that he is preventing her from doing better. As Roissy frequently points out, tingles tend to come from a defensive position. This isn’t to say that all such women will decide to be truly happy after abandoning their schemes of treachery; our culture is still profoundly dysfunctional, and what would make her happy (submitting to her husband) is taught as weakness by feminists and a sin (unless she “submits” with moxie) by supposedly traditional folks like the CBMW. But at the core of your question is “Is marriage sacred if one or both spouses aren’t haaapy?” This is the core feminist argument against lifetime marriage. To a feminist the answer is no. To a Christian the answer must be yes. This is the case even though the premise that people would be on average happier if not following the biblical instruction on marriage is false.
FH
what I’m not able to understand is why a man would intentionally go out of his way to save his marriage to a woman who obviously doesn’t really want him in any shape or form.
I’m not Dalrock, and don’t even play him on TV, but can offer a suggestion…you wrote yourself:
To save the marriage, the children, the sanctity of marriage?
Men tend to be loyal towards their family, especially their children – this is why ringing the “Deadbeat Dad” bell gets so many men, most especially the “traditional conservative” to come running and support whatever the current push item on the menu happens to be. This is in part how the Bradley Amendment came to be law, ditto VAWA.
Many men will put up with a whole lot of agony to protect their children, and it is no secret that while divorce after children have left home is bad, and has bad effects on them, it’s much worse to divorce while children are still legal minors. So, to sum up, often it appears to me to be indeed do it for the children.
I’m wondering whether there is a point in time when such a woman, who is considering this ideal, is beyond the point of trying to save.
Obviously this is the case.
Perhaps the overriding reason is that divorce itself is such a bad outcome for a man that it is better for him to try to save a marriage even when he actually isn’t wanted at all but treated with contempt.
Don’t forget that the majority of men are Beta, and the Beta mindset when it comes to women is one of scarcity. In addition to attempting to protect children, many men subconsciously believe that if they lose this woman, they won’t get another one. For some that is true – I was listening to a divorced friend of mine just this weekend outline some of the things his ex is doing to sabotage the joint custody they have of two children. As he talked, I recalled that he was a confirmed bachelor when he married his foreign bride and brought her to the continental US. It is very likely he’s done with women.
But for other men, it is not true provided they learn some Game. Leaving aside religious objections to divorce and remarriage there’s often no reason why a man who is frivorced cannot remarry once he’s over the pain of the experience, provided he abandons the scarcity mindset for one of abundance. Until that mental shift occurs, though, he’ll stick with her even as she betrays his trust over and over again.
Hopeful to feeriker:
However, are you basing the idea of “a woman who obviously doesn’t really want him” on the woman’s speech or actions?
While it is true that actions speak louder than words, for many, many men words mean things, they are not just random sounds thrown into the air for some sort of dramatic effect. One of the most difficult things for many men to learn is the temporary nature of women’s words: attaching “right at this moment” or “for the moment” or “at this time”, etc. to their words makes some easier to deal with.
Although if one follows that down the path, one finds that women getting married actually say this:
“I do, at this moment”
This is not a happy thing to contemplate for the average Beta man.
Feminist Hater:
I’ll take a stab at responding to your question.
Men are called to relate to their wives in the way Christ is related to the church. You could easily restate your question, why would God bother trying to save people who reject Him? Why pursue Israel when she is unfaithful?
The answer is the same in both cases. We are thankful that God wants us even though we reject him, and He works to make us worthy of the love He gives us. Some of us recognize that we’re being given far more than we deserve, and some of us don’t. But if we weren’t offered more than we deserve we would never repent and turn to God, nor would we be able to if He hadn’t gone first.
Our culture poisons people, especially women. This is true of the world in general, and it’s true of our current culture specifically. The average Christian man has to deal with temptations to view pornography that he wouldn’t have had to deal with 50 years ago, and his culture tells him it’s acceptable, which it didn’t 50 years ago. This sin, while still his fault, is exacerbated and encouraged by his surroundings. It hurts himself and his family, and he knows it, but it’s still something he has to work hard to avoid.
Now obviously frivolous divorce is far more serious than occasionally viewing porn. But it’s encouraged by many in the culture, and even (sadly) in the church. Many women (and of course many people) are not very introspective and don’t give a lot of thought to moral issues. The culture frames it in terms of empowerment, and that she “deserves to be happy,” etc., and not as a moral issue on her part. This makes it easy to rationalize it, just as it’s easy for a man these days to rationalize porn as a “normal” thing that “everyone does.” It doesn’t remove responsibility, but it does mean that many of them are just lead astray and are not intentionally morally despicable.
And even if she is being despicable, for a husband being Christlike means loving her and wanting what’s best for her even when she rejects it, and even when she hurts him. If her husband is a decent man he knows that being married to him is the best thing for her, even if it’s not what she feels like she wants right now. We’ve seen Dalrock’s stats about happiness and divorce. A good husband protects her, even from herself. Sometimes especially from herself.
Is this “fair”? Sometimes it really isn’t. Some wives never have and never will do anything to deserve this kind of love and devotion. But then none of us will ever deserve God’s love and devotion to us. Loving her no matter what is what we signed up for as Christian husbands. It’s not an easy gig, but it is awfully rewarding.
I was fascinated by Hans Solo’s link, about the falling marriage rate for women aged 30-34 in comparison with men in the same age bracket. If one rules out the possibility that white men of that age are marrying Asians or Africans in large numbers, then the only conclusion must be that they are either marrying older women (unlikely) or younger women (highly probable).
Is that a correct deduction?
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Oscar Wilde
Thanks Dal, feeriker and AR. It is kind of silly when you answer some of your own question. However, it bugs me. I really do get trying to save the sanctity of marriage and the right of children to be with both parents in a loving family. It’s just that something really irks me about the ability to use such a tradition, that the family and most of civilisation rest on, as a threat point that calls into question the very reason two people got married in the first place.
It’s detestable that either party, whether man or woman, would use this as a means to get one over their spouse.
As AR says, it’s using the man’s natural inclination, to protect and preserve what is his, against him in the most horrendous way.
And yes Dal, I do get that feminists use the same argument time and time again. And I do detest feminists, but that certainly doesn’t mean I don’t question what they question. It seems the answer to my question lies not in the ability to deter a woman from divorcing but actually trying instill a level of trust between man and wife, which hopefully erodes the need for such use of a threat point.
It does also seem that a lot of the problem with frivorce is the belief that a woman does indeed have the absolute right to change her mind, which is preposterous, and thus perhaps the point of contention should start here? Why should a woman have the right to change her mind?
I am married to a much younger woman. When she tells me that if she leaves me I will never find another woman like her, I respond, the next woman will be completely different. This usually leads to a short silence and then a change of subject.
Yes men need to shift to an abundance mindset. I have tried to instill this in my sons.
Why should a woman have the right to change her mind?
Well, for some Churchians, because “weaker vessel” and “fairness”, apparently.
Leaving the exegetical details of “weaker vessel” to others, bear in mind that we swim in a sea of feminism. If we aren’t actively rejecting the tropes of feminism, we passively accept them.
It’s work to tell oneself “men and women are different” when the broader culture insists “men and women are just the same except women have babies (and are just “better”)”. Accepting that women are different from men leads, in some cases, to the notion that while women certainly may want to change their minds whenever it feeeels right, it does not follow that they should be allowed to do so.
However, that leads to a discussion about equality – or perhaps Zed’s term of “eek-wallet-y” is more appropriate?
@Opus
It is one possibilty if you only look at that age range but then you see that the gap in the marriage rates for the younger cohorts have narrowed too, becoming equal for the 25-29 y/o’s and closer for the 20-24 y/o’s. So that would imply that not a lot of older white men are marrying younger white women. I think that a more likely explanation is that whites who marry whites (say for younger then 34) are marrying more similarly in age in 2007 than they were in 2000 (though I don’t know, I’m just speculating) and that there is a bit more of white men marrying other races/ethnicities. I know of several cases where a white man married a latina and we hear about how Asian women are sought after by quite a few white men.
I don’t claim to know the answers of why. More than anything, I’m just reporting the numbers. So yours or anyone else’s thoughts on why are most welcome.
Well Han, we could speculate as to who exactly white men are marrying but a definitive trend appears for white women; and that is that their marriage rates are in a big decline, one that seems to be on a continual trend that doesn’t show signs of stopping. At least not for the short to medium term.
Personally, I think it’s a combination of economic ability of young white men being squeezed plus young white women delaying marriage that equals older white womens’ downward trend in marriageability.
“what I’m not able to understand is why a man would intentionally go out of his way to save his marriage to a woman who obviously doesn’t really want him in any shape or form.”
If you’ve invested a lot into something…you’d do everything you would to keep it around because of that thing called love.
You and I aren’t married so to us it seems crazy to put up with this type of behavior…but I bet guys who have invested in a woman for a period of time in marriage know this better.
@Feminist Hater
I agree that there’s likely a combo of young women delaying marriage and younger men being squeezed economically.
Then once the unmarried women hit 30+ and their SMV starts to drop, most of them want to marry but they maintain excessively elevated expectations of whom they will marry and thus few of the straggling spinsters end up marrying.
I should do some research on trends in interracial marriages to see if the # of white men marrying non-white women has risen. Anecdotally, I see it to some extent where I know of various latinas that have married white men.
In case no one’s yet asked, shouldn’t it properly be called divorce insurance?
This doesn’t exist in spite of a HUGE potential market because no one is really stupid enough to knowingly take on the risk of the bait-and-switch scam known as Women/Marriage/Divorce 2.0. Tells you all you need to know.
FH:
I can tell you that as one who’s seen it and almost experienced it, the foremost thoughts in a man’s mind when facing the possibility of divorce are:
1. I have to prevent her from destroying everything.
2. I have to protect the children.
3. Omigod this is more important to her than her own children.
Absolutely the reason a man stays with a wife who doesn’t want him is to protect his children and prevent her from burning everything to the ground.
My uncle’s first wife cheated on him. He would have taken her back but she left and wouldn’t return. She forced him into a divorce. His children were 8 and 6 at the time, I believe. He had no chance to raise his kids and was perpetually in court over child support.
Behold the effects on this one family. Both his kids have been divorced twice. His daughter refused to have children. She married twice interspersed with carousel riding. She’s 40 and continues her party lifestyle. His son has a daughter of his own and never sees her. He has sworn off women entirely now. Both of them isolate themselves from extended family because they have no idea what an extended family looks like or how to interact with one. They have become accustomed to living solitary, antisocial lives. He is an incel; she has returned to cougaring it up.
Sad, really.
“ It does also seem that a lot of the problem with frivorce is the belief that a woman does indeed have the absolute right to change her mind, which is preposterous, and thus perhaps the point of contention should start here? Why should a woman have the right to change her mind?”
Well, you have to understand churchian speak and Christianese. According to our high priests of churchianity (Driscoll, Rainey, Dobson, Stanton et al):
God is Love.
God wants His children to be happy.
Love makes women happy.
God would not give me a man who does not make me happy.
If my man does not make me happy, then he does not love me.
God does not want me to be unloved and unhappy.
If I am not loved, this man/marriage is not from God.
If this marriage is not of God, then I am free to leave it.
“My uncle’s first wife cheated on him. He would have taken her back but she left and wouldn’t return. She forced him into a divorce.”
I’m just curious and maybe this is just the circles I roll in but I’ve heard men say that if a man cheats a woman is much more likely to take him back because for men cheating is largely physical (opportunity presented itself, caught him at a weak point/off guard, but he’s not invested in nor in love with mistress) whereas when a woman cheats, it’s much more emotional and men are far less likely to take her back. Now of course I believe the man I heard say this was talking about dating situations and marriage is different, but from what others have said this idea that men are not as emotionally invested in relationships as women are is not entirely true. Or at least not in the same ways.
Perhaps Christian men and women need a refresher course on what love is.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
It sure isn’t all about feelings or haaaaaaaaapiness. In fact it is basically a set of actions you do or don’t do.
This is why Dalrock’s blog is the best. He gets it. This it the ROOT of the issue on marriage and why it is important to stay married. Even if your spouse makes you miserable, the marriage is more important than what you want to make you happy. That last sentence is a non-starter in feminism, a deal breaker. That is why feminism is evil.
It sure isn’t all about feelings or haaaaaaaaapiness. In fact it is basically a set of actions you do or don’t do.
Yes, this. As long we expect to feeel perpetually in love, we set ourselves up for disappointment. I know that not everyone agrees with me on that, but it’s still true. Emotion is a part of love in marriage, but not the sum of it.
Unfortunately we have trained an entire generation that our feelings can be counted on as “leadings of the Holy Spirit”, and it has become the ruin of many marriages in the church.
Deti pretty much nails it with this, as I have heard it near verbatim:
God is Love.
God wants His children to be happy.
Love makes women happy.
God would not give me a man who does not make me happy.
If my man does not make me happy, then he does not love me.
God does not want me to be unloved and unhappy.
If I am not loved, this man/marriage is not from God.
If this marriage is not of God, then I am free to leave it.
Look at that Deti. You and I agree on something!
FH
I think you ascribe a masculine viewpoint to the women you’re talking about. Men see a problem and look for a solution. Often, all a woman is able to do is experience the anxiety of having a problem. Their mindset seems to make it very difficult for them to see a problem and think, “What contributes to this problem? What can I do that would make it better? What things could I ask others to do, within reason, that would make it better?” They simply stew in the emotions the problem creates in them.
This is why it’s unusual for a wife or girlfriend to start with “When you do X, it makes me feel like you don’t want to spend time with me. Could you please do it differently?” She experiences that feeling, but doesn’t think what she can do about it. Generally the first time he hears about it is when she’s screaming “You don’t love me! You don’t even want to be around me!”
Since seeking a reasonable solution to the problem doesn’t occur to her, she’s stuck with all the feelings of helplessness and anxiety. And so she thinks “if I just left I wouldn’t feel this way anymore.” And it’s actually true, to some extent. Those particular feelings would go away, which is what she really wants. She doesn’t think “of course, then I’ll have other, possibly more serious, problems to deal with.” That part is irrelevant at the moment, and requires more ability to assess the situation than she has (or is able to access, anyway).
Imagine if the TV in the bedroom was on some channel where it was playing one of those sounds only some people can hear, really loudly. She doesn’t acknowledge that it’s there, and because it’s so annoying when you ask her about it it becomes an accusation — “why the hell did you make the TV make this sound? What’s wrong with you?” which upsets her but she still doesn’t know what you’re talking about. You want to be in there and spend time with your wife, but it’s hard because the sound is so painful. Eventually you feel frustrated with her and you just want to get out of the house to get away from it. At no point does it occur to you to try to fix the TV or turn it off.
I think this is how women are with their emotions. They experience the pain of an unpleasant emotional response to a situation, but aren’t able to formulate a reasonable plan of action to deal with it. As a consequence the only options they understand are 1) stay and endure this forever or 2) leave and not deal with this anymore. I think, given those options only, plenty of men would choose #2, and do.
I don’t think they are, on average, as heartless as a lot of men think. They have a strong tendency to assume that things will always be exactly the way they are — if he’s been tired and not very interested in her lately because he’s exhausted from work, “he isn’t attracted to me anymore.” If he’s been snappy because he’s been feeling sick, “he doesn’t care about me anymore.” If he doesn’t help her with chores around the house because he’s got work he has to get done, “he never helps around the house.” They take the last two data points from every category and extrapolate them linearly into the future. If men did the same, and believed it, they would probably act similarly. It’s not good that they do this, but it explains how they can desire divorce without being pure evil, and why a husband might want to put in the effort to show them that the things they’re worried about will not last forever, and indeed some of them can be over tonight if she would just tell him about them.
Elspeth said As long we expect to feeel perpetually in love, we set ourselves up for disappointment. I know that not everyone agrees with me on that, but it’s still true. Emotion is a part of love in marriage, but not the sum of it.
Unfortunately we have trained an entire generation that our feelings can be counted on as “leadings of the Holy Spirit”, and it has become the ruin of many marriages in the church.
Thank you, Elspeth! I’m going to print this out in gold letters and frame it.
If the Holy Spirit has any feelings…they are fiery, powerful, controlled ones. To get your butt into action and deal with the conflicts that comes your way.
They sure aren’t overwhelming feelings of happiness, tingles, and pleasure.
To expand a bit, I think women also have a tendency to unconsciously assume that other people automatically know how they’re feeling. Maybe they’re able to assess emotions very accurately in other women and they assume men can do this with them? I don’t have experience to know that. But my experience is that, when a situation involving a woman’s husband is causing her emotional pain, she assumes he knows how she’s feeling. If he knows how she’s feeling and doesn’t fix it for her, then he either wants her to feel this way, or doesn’t care that she feels this way. Either way it’s his fault, and either way if she talks to him about it he’ll only make her feel worse about it.
I think this is where the “emotional abuse” thing comes from. She felt bad, and because (she assumes) he knew how bad she felt and either caused it or was fine with it happening, he was abusing her. In the same way, it would be physical abuse if he either beat her or allowed her to be beaten and didn’t disapprove of it. This also why many husbands are totally blindsided — she blames him for emotional pain he wasn’t even aware of, because she assumes he has to have known. It probably also accounts for the vindictiveness of some wives during the process — “he’s been intentionally causing me emotional pain for 20 years; I deserve some payback.”
This whole chain of assumptions is totally incorrect, but wives have a tendency to believe in it anyway. So the choices become 1) stay with a man who makes me miserable and wants me to be miserable, forever, or 2) escape.
If this is her reasoning for wanting to divorce, then it’s based on her having inaccurate information, not (so much) on her being a horrible person. It’s close to the difference between a woman who sleeps with a man after thinking her husband is dead, as opposed to just cheating on him. It’s her wanting to leave a man who hates her so much that he wants her to suffer, as opposed to leaving a man who loves her and takes good care of the kids because she doesn’t feel happy enough to suit her. In this case, if she can be shown that her understanding is wrong, then she may be able to return to a happy marriage, and he may be able to trust her again in the future. If he knows how to handle her, he can figure out what’s bothering her and how to correct it. If she no longer believes that things will be horrible forever, then she is likely to be willing to work on things and return to a good relationship.
Since seeking a reasonable solution to the problem doesn’t occur to her, she’s stuck with all the feelings of helplessness and anxiety. And so she thinks “if I just left I wouldn’t feel this way anymore.” And it’s actually true, to some extent. Those particular feelings would go away, which is what she really wants. She doesn’t think “of course, then I’ll have other, possibly more serious, problems to deal with.” That part is irrelevant at the moment, and requires more ability to assess the situation than she has (or is able to access, anyway).
Yes. This is indicative of how women in general are really not long-term thinkers who see “the big picture.” Economists call this “high time preference” (one symptom of which is the need for immediate gratification without thinking of long-term consequences).
“Maybe they’re able to assess emotions very accurately in other women and they assume men can do this with them? I don’t have experience to know that.”
They can assess emotions pretty accurately. Reasoning behind them not so much.
But if they are subtley hating me because of some slight I have no clue about…how am I supposed to decipher that?
@Hans Solo
The (so tragic one had to laugh) answer seems to imply that the chances of women marrying over the age of thirty are even worse than previously believed – men won’t, despite all the shaming, touch them. Of course it may be that women in their thirties would rather eat barbed-wire than marry.
earl
I get the impression that most women feel hatred towards their men sometimes. The trick is to get them to talk about how they feel in a productive way. It’s awfully difficult. I’m lucky in this area because my wife is pretty open about her feelings. I’ll often ask her a question and she’ll say “I don’t want to talk about it…you’ll just get mad at me.” This indicates that the issue is important and I need to approach it carefully, to try to get the information out of her without judging until I know what’s going on.
When she’s feeling something bad, she has a tendency to see me and that feeling on one side against herself — it helps to make it clear that you’re on her side against that feeling. She really needs to feel that you’re on her side. Being angry at her for having unreasonable feelings about you is counterproductive, at least at the moment when she’s having them. Later, when she’s feeling normal, you can discuss why she shouldn’t worry about that issue, but she can’t process that when she’s feeling it.
I’m not sure what the right approach is for this in the general case (i.e. when you don’t know if something is wrong/everything is fine as far as you know); maybe some of the ladies can help. It’s definitely important to keep an eye out for any changes in her, and to ask her about anything that might be bothering her sometimes, whether you think something specific is or not.
The idea of me as her emotional rock helps me a lot; that’s what I shoot for. She has violent emotional changes and she really needs to be grounded. I could easily feel anger toward her for some of her actions, but the more I understand her the more I realize that her reason is a little boat on a stormy sea of emotions. I want her to learn to sail better, but the seas are very powerful.
@ Elspeth:
I knew you could be reasonable.
“Even if your spouse makes you miserable, the marriage is more important than what you want to make you happy. That last sentence is a non-starter in feminism, a deal breaker.”
A huge, huge part of the reason we are where we are with regard to marriage is the shift in frame about what marriage is. The Judeo-Christian model for marriage is family/support. The current model for marriage is hedonic. That is, the biblical use of marriage is for mutual support, a sanctioned and safe place for sexual expression; and for the rearing of children. But that’s not what marriage is now. Marriage now is said to be for the personal happiness and fulfillment of its participants. Mutual support and kids are secondary.
With this comes very, very high expectations for marriage, especially on the part of women. The media and entertainment have built marriage up to be Happily Ever After/Prince Charming/McMansion/2.4 kids/multiple orgasms/breakfast in bed/rose petals on the floor/fulfilling career in which she doesn’t really work but earns lots of money. For men, marriage is supposed to be where he finally can relax and doesn’t have to run Game all the time and can get sex on tap whenever he wants it.
But of course, human nature being what it is, marriage is not at all like that. Disillusionment and shattered dreams follow.
deti
Reminds me of the Screwtape Letters:
[Screwtape]: …Humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves “in love”, and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion. … Any sexual infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage [these days, read ‘monogamy’] will be regarded as “love”, and “love” will be held to excuse a man [or woman] from all the guilt, and to protect him from all the consequences, of marrying a heathen, a fool, or a wanton.
Yup.
One of the best arguments I ever heard from a conformed bachelor as to why he valued his bachelor’s taste for freedom so much:
I am a bachelor because I can’t be bothered to worry about someone else’s feelings.
That statement right there might very well be the ultimate in selfishness that there is, to choose a lifestyle simply because you are too self-centered to worry about others. But for people who know themselves (and know themselves really well) they are going to know if they are capable of empathy or not. And if they aren’t, they should know to never marry. If they are, they should know that they are going to have to empathyze even when they think the situation is ridiculous, or else never marry.
As few thoughts on the increasing gap between white-female (WF) marriage rate and the white-male (WM) rate.
1) Females want to “marry up” the social/economic ladder.
2) Females earn more college degrees than men. This makes the pool of potential male husbands smaller than the pool of females (last I saw it was 140 female degrees for every 100 male degrees).
3) A higher percentage of WF’s earn college degrees than any other racial group, which further skews the ratio (I don’t know the number, but I would guess the ratio of WF/WM is greater than the 140/100 general number).
4) Males have no problem “marrying-down” the social/economic ladder–way down. Plenty of males with advanced degrees are happy to look right past the college educated WF and marry a woman with nothing more than a high school diploma. This further reduces the pool of male candidates.
5) IMHO, college educated WF’s are less likely to marry across racial lines than any other group. This is particularly true for the WF/asian-male combo (which, as far as I can tell, is all but non-existent). And while the white-female/black-male combo is is common on the lower end of the social/economic ladder, you don’t see that many college educated WF’s married to black-males. So, the pool of potential mates is further reduced by WF’s eliminated non-white males from consideration.
6) College educated males are, IMHO, more likely to marry across racial lines than any group. WM/Latino-female and WM/Asian-female are pretty common sites. Plus (as you saw in the sandwich story), there is a growing trend of college educated black females marrying college educated WM’s. Once again, the pool of potential male mates is reduced.
7) I could be wrong about this one (as I don’t know the numbers), but I would guess that the percentage of openly gay males is higher for college educated WM’s than for any other group (including the percentage of openly gay college educated WF’s). Again, reducing the pool size.
Hopeful:
In marriages, men and women usually cheat for different reasons.
When men cheat, almost all the time it’s because (1) less often, his wife cannot or will not have sex with him; or (2) more often, he just wants sexual variety. He has no intention of leaving his wife, and in fact he probably still loves her and wants to remain married to her. He just wants something on the side. It’s about the sex primarily; about an emotional attachment secondarily.
When a woman cheats, in all likelihood she has checked out of the marriage. The sex with another man is just the last step in that process. She simply has decided she doesn’t see her husband “in that way” anymore. She “loves him but isn’t in love with him”. She has friendzoned her husband. Once that happens, it is nearly impossible for her to be sexually attracted to her husband again. She’s not looking for just some other man to have sex with; she’s looking for a replacement husband. When she has sex with another man not her husband, she in effect has replaced him.
When the husband cheats it’s relatively easy for him to return to the marriage and leave the mistress because whatever emotional attachment he has to her is easily severed and isn’t as strong or sticky as that with his wife. In addition, at least one other woman was willing to have sex with him, and that message is not lost on the wife. It raises issues of women’s internecine competition as well as preselection. The wife either (1) realizes how desirable her husband is and that only increases her attraction to him; or (2) figures that she better step up her game to keep him from stepping out.
When the wife cheats, she’s sent the clear message to her husband that he’s just not good enough for her. She’s completely severed whatever bond she had with him. That bond is almost impossible to reattach even if she wants to.
That’s why wife cheating is almost always fatal to a marriage, while husband cheating is easier to recover from.
Imagine if the TV in the bedroom was on some channel where it was playing one of those sounds only some people can hear, really loudly.
Many men can imagine that. Let’s go a bit further. Let’s imagine that there is a TV in every room of the house that emits a high pitched sound only one man can hear. The putative head of the household, in fact. When he comes home, he’s greeted by this headache-generating sound. It’s in the kitchen while he gets a glass of water. It’s in the bathroom while he takes a shower. It’s absolutely in the bedroom…
In fact, this sound that only he can here, that grates on his nerves like fingernails down a chalkboard is being played everywhere in the house except a small workshop in the garage. The sound is there from the time he gets up in the morning to the time he goes to bed at night. It’s there constantly, in case I did not make that clear, and yet when mentioned to anyone else, the answer ranges from “Noise? What noise? I don’t hear any noise!” to “if you were more of a man that noise would not bother you”, with other possible responses too numerous to mention.
I forgot to mention that it is forbidden to turn of the TV sets. He can’t make the noise stop, except by being asleep.
Question: where will he be able to avoid having yet another headache generated? Where can he feel the slightest bit at ease?
Question: when he’s told that this noise is all his fault, but he’s strictly prohibited from doing anything about it, what conclusion should he reach?
I’ll buy this Deti but what you’ve just done is given two excellent reasons why some men should simply never marry. They need to know themselves.
The marriage is paramount, more important than your needs. If your wife refuses to have sex with you, that is sin on her part but it never-ever justifies adultry on your part. Never. If you know yourself and you know that you are going to get laid no matter what (either wife submits all the time or another woman MUST) then don’t get married. You (as a man) are not marriage material.
If you know that you need to have sex with many different women (variety is the spice of life) and you could never settle for just one and never any others, then once again, you are putting your needs ahead of the sacrament of marriage. Not acceptable. Know yourself. Its okay with me if you know yourself well enough to acknowledge that you could never be faithful to one woman. Some men can’t. But in these circumstances, you (as a man) are not marriage material.
Marriage offers many benefits and privleges in society. Yes there are less and less of them, but there still are benefits. If you are not capabale (or just not willing) to fulfill many of the obligations that a man must in marriage, then by your own choosing, you have taken yourself out of the marriage pool. You don’t get the benefits. That’s fine. Take yourself out of the pool before you hurt yourself (or before you hurt a woman.)
Thanks, deti.
The marriage is paramount, more important than your needs. If your wife refuses to have sex with you, that is sin on her part but it never-ever justifies adultry on your part. Never. If you know yourself and you know that you are going to get laid no matter what (either wife submits all the time or another woman MUST) then don’t get married. You (as a man) are not marriage material.
Since when did IBB start channeling Zippy?
“If your wife refuses to have sex with you, that is sin on her part but it never-ever justifies adultry on your part. Never. “
That is absolutely true. In my view, the remedy for this is to apply ever increasing pressure to convince the wife why it’s in her interests to hold up her end of the marriage bargain up to and including the husband’s complete withdrawal of everything he brings to the marriage, including financial support. In my opinion, if she still won’t hold up her end of the bargain, it’s marital abandonment and grounds for civil divorce, but the man isn’t released to remarry.
(This is my position and belief and isn’t entirely biblical but reflects the realities of the current marriage market place. I recognize Dalrock and other bloggers may disagree with me.)
8T012
I think those are some good thoughts on what is going on with white men and women’s marriage rates, particularly those related to white college-educated women not marrying other races or non-college-educate men as much while the white college-educated men don’t have quite as many reservations about those things.
AR
There’s a definite parallel here, yes. And I think it matches a complementary difference between men and women — men are primarily frustrated by things other people do to them; women are primarily frustrated by things that aren’t done for them.
The wife nagging and being difficult all the time creates in her husband a sort of equivalent situation to the wife who feels unhappy because of things her husband doesn’t do (e.g. making her feel attraction, leading). In both cases, it’s likely that the situation could be remedied if the other person were willing to make some (probably fairly small) changes. Indeed, I think the hopelessness that both feel is due to believing that the situation will not improve.
There are certainly differences. I guess I wanted to point out that, from the woman’s perspective, her feelings are often involuntary, and her need to escape happens because she can’t imagine any other way to get away from the feelings she’s having. I guess you could see excessive beta-ness as a male equivalent of nagging. Intentional or not, it creates bad feelings in the other person and may eventually drive them away. Men are usually more aware that it’s the nagging that makes them want to leave, but the effect is similar.
AR
It definitely seems much worse, from a man’s perspective, when a woman nags, because it’s an action taken intentionally. But for a woman, things that a man doesn’t do that she wants/needs feel like things he intentionally withholds. So even though it seems much worse to a man to do something annoying than to not do something kind or loving, how she feels is that you intentionally withheld love from her in the form of that action (even if you didn’t know she wanted you to do it).
Eidolon, remember this:
5. It’s not your job to change or fix her… your job is to love her as she is with no expectation of her ever changing.
So clearly in this context the man must “just get it”, i.e. know what his wife wants without her articulation and if possible before she herself knows it, but he’s prohibited from attempting even the slightest change in her behavior.
She can rail about the TV set in the bedroom. He’s prohibited from even discussing the TV set there and in every other room in the house. This is the way more than one man lives. And this is what churches are teaching men – Do Not Attempt To Change The Channel.
Ho Lee-Fuk! I didn’t realize that Arterburn had been divorced TWICE! What on earth is he doing writing books about marriage, and why on earth–answering my first question by raising the second–do Christians buy his materials?
I’ve been skeptical of him for a long time, as I have grown to be skeptical of most of what comes from the evangelical world. This pretty much shows that my suspicions were warranted.
AR
Agreed. What women need to be taught is: your emotions will control you if you let them. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Emotions are irrational and often immoral or amoral. Find someone who can anchor you, who is not subject (or is far less subject) to the turbulent emotions that you feel. Recognize that he’s probably right when he tells you you’re being crazy. Remember that you chose him because he was better at acting reasonably in difficult situations, and rely on him when you’re really upset. Trust that he has your best interests in mind even when you don’t feel it. If you have good reason to think so from past experience, believe that he loves you even when it doesn’t feel that way.
Basically, the exact opposite of what’s being taught to women now. I think the equivalent of the modern teaching for women, translated for guys, would be “if she gains one pound or nags you one time, she’s deliberately destroying your happiness. You should bail, take the kids, and crush her financially!”
What on earth is he doing writing books about marriage, and why on earth–answering my first question by raising the second–do Christians buy his materials?
Your second question answers your first.
Empathy is fine…as long as what feelings are being said is true.
Being tired from kids running around the house and cleaning is one thing…being tired because you spent all day watching tv, eating junk food, and surfing facebook is another thing.
I’m starting to feel so discouraged, that unless we address this issue, I don’t think I can continue like this.
I feel really alone. I don’t want to go on like this.
I have this feeling that we are drifting apart. I do not want to live this way.
You can see how this is framed as “fix this or else,” not “here’s a problem, please help me solve it.” She’s laying divorce on the table as her response if he doesn’t fix things, before she even tells him what the problem is. Note that not fixing this situation on the man’s part amounts to forcing her to “live this way,” “feel really alone,” and “feel so discouraged.” As I said above, in her mind failure to make her feel loved equals intentional withholding of love.
earl
Yeah, that’s a whole different thing. If I figure out how to get a woman to be as interested in changing the things about her that bother me as she is in me changing the things that bother her, I’ll let you know. Then I’ll write a book and make a fortune.
I’ve had some success by reminding her that there were things I did that frustrated her, and she needed me to change those things, and that it goes both ways. This only works when she’s in a good mood, and its effectiveness is still limited, but she has made some effort. That’s about all I’ve got.
Amir:
Yeah, Steve Arterburn should be totally and completely discredited as a relationship/marriage counselor. I don’t think a man on his third marriage should be offering such advice especially from a Christian perspective.
Noted pastor Charles Stanley is divorced. His ex wife Anna divorced him after about 35 years of marriage. The reasons are unknown. But you’ll note that he never preaches on marriage. I at least respect Dr. Stanley for not preaching on marriage.
I have often wondered whether Hans Solo and Napoleon Solo were related. Or perhaps they were both dreamt up by the same Hollywood hack – never met anyone called Solo – or Duet.
@Amir – Arterburn has been divorced twice. The pastor at my church was marketing a seminar by Arterburn and my wife couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to do it. There’s a messy history there that seems to be pretty well covered up, but persistent googling turns up some hints. If I’m not mistaken, either he or his 2nd wife were carrying on an affair, which was part of the 2nd divorce.
Somewhere in there, there was also a lawsuit regarding Arterburn’s girlfriend (before marriages) getting an abortion. http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org/artsue46.html
Christianity has gone way too far in the whole forgiving business. It’s one thing to forgive someone their sins, it’s another thing to embrace a sinner as a leader in the Church. In fact, it may be that the only “unforgivable sin” would be homosexuality (i.e. Ted Haggard), and I expect that in 10 years or so, that’ll fall.
Proverbs 14:1 “The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.”
@feeriker
All men are different.
All husbands are the same.
– sportswriter Burt Sugar’s “Aunt Weeda” (sp?)
Charles Stanley used to preach on marriage. His church also had a rule that any pastor on got a divorce was released, because they preached it was the husband’s responsibility to lead his family, and thus the divorce was due to the husband’s failings (even if his wife initiated the divorce). They were hardline on this one.
Then Stanley’s wife divorced him, and suddenly the rule went away. I’m sure it had everything to do with a change of heart on the matter, and nothing to do with the fact that Stanley brought in all the money to the church.
I didn’t realize that Arterburn had been divorced TWICE! What on earth is he doing writing books about marriage,
I’m reminded of what a professor once said to the class: “Those who can’t do, teach”.
and why on earth–answering my first question by raising the second–do Christians buy his materials?
The cynic in me suspects that one can slap a Jesus fish on almost anything and sell it to churchgoing people. Not anything, mind you, but almost anything.
This thread piqued my interest and I did some backup research. The best reference on Arterburn’s history seems to be an April 2006 GQ article by Walter Kirn. It’s not available online but I did find a summary here:
http://michaeldavidestes.blogspot.com/2006/06/mohler-on-divorce.html
Ironically, according to Kirn, Arterburn’s 3rd wife is a solid 20 years younger than he is.
Here’s another article where Arterburn discusses the abortion his college girlfriend had:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/arterburn-272198-says-life.html
Noted pastor Charles Stanley is divorced. His ex wife Anna divorced him after about 35 years of marriage. The reasons are unknown. But you’ll note that he never preaches on marriage. I at least respect Dr. Stanley for not preaching on marriage.
If a pastor’s wife, presumably one who has been a life-long Bible-believing Christian, as was her husband, who was married under the covenant of a Christian (i.e., biblical) marriage, and who has been “Mrs. Pastor” for decades suddenly divorces her pastor husband, then I believe that both of them OWE their congregation an explanation (not that any such explanation would likely be biblically legitimate). After all, pastors and their wives don’t divorce “just ’cause they ain’t feeling it anymore.” Divorce has a serious impact on a man in a position of Christian influence, leadership and authority, as well as on his wife. The pastor’s very credibility as a minister of the Gospel and as a shepherd of the flock are at stake.
If I were one of Stanley’s congregants, I would definitely want to know the truth beyond his divorce. I don’t think II could remain a member of his congregation without knowing it (and probably not even if I did; it’s hard to imagine any reason given being genuinely biblical).
I’m one of those geezers old enough to remember the days when a divorce would effectively end a pastor’s career (I remember two from my youth who suffered exactly this fate).
“behind” his divorce…” (AAARGH! I wish there was an editing feature here!)
@GKChesterton…
In all my years in the church, I never saw scripture reference us as gods.
Could you please cite the source/location? I’m quite curious about it.
feeriker
What I’ve heard about it is that she felt he was spending too much time on his business and church obligations and not enough on his family/her. I suppose it could also have to do with the schism between him and his son. I’m not sure when that happened.
I think you have a point; it seems like you should be able to either tell all and let the congregation/church leaders decide your fate, or tell nothing and step down. Seems problematic to tell nothing and stay on. I guess in some cases maybe the church leader talks to the elders/leaders of the church and they decide if he stays or not. I could see circumstances where talking about what happened would publicly humiliate someone and you might want to avoid that. I’m not sure if that happened in his case or not.
@Eidolon:
I confess to not knowing a whole lot about Stanley (or his background) other than having occasionally heard his sermons on syndicated Christian radio in years past. What little impression I have formed of him based on those programs, however, is that he’s a stereotypical churchian CEO of the televangelist strain. Thus it doesn’t surprise me that 1) the circumstances of his divorce aren’t very clear or well known, 2) he’s still manning the pulpit (and yes, as 8to12 suggests, the fact that he’s a famous entertainevanglist who brings fat tithes and offerings to the collection plate probably has EVERYTHING to do with that), and 3) the board of directors of his churchian franchise let him keep his CEO chair.
My statement in my previous post that I couldn’t remain part of Stanley’s congregation without knowing the circumstances of his divorce was purely rhetorical, made to illustrate a point. It’s unlikely that I’d ever be caught walking down the same side of the street as Stanley’s “church,” let alone spend any time inside of it for so much as sixty serious seconds.
feeriker
He always struck me as being a pretty good preacher, but I do have problems with the way he conducts himself sometimes. For example, it would’ve been very easy to gently pass leadership of his church to someone else, with him having so many other obligations, and perhaps teach on occasion. It seems egoish to want to have both, especially given the previous hard-line stance.
I’ve also heard that he’s now setting things up so his grandson can run things in his operation eventually, and that he’s passed over a lot of good people already there to make that happen. It doesn’t seem right to me to pass it to some untested kid just because he’s related to the right person.
@8T012
If you don’t mind treading through a “few” mindless posts, several of your arguments are backed up by sources in posts found here (page 10 and on is when it gets interesting): http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=823388&page=10
Being cynical toward marriage is the safe money bet.
I’ve a comment/question but first recognitions after reading the whole comment thread.
@Cane, re: moral agency … well said. Made me feel good to read I pulled the whole thread back up while I’m out on vacation with my kids just to re-enjoy that one.
@Deti … some very hard hitters give me a lot to think about … back to that in a moment.
@Dalrock, re: the spiritual question of shall the wretched be saved … ouch! well put. can I borrow that for a book or something? and not even that I know the answer. Laying aside the philosophical answer in abstract, up close and personal I know one wretched I loved with all I had to love and she sought actively (and failed miserably) to utterly destroy me. I know another who I offered perfect one sided peace to and he attempted to take my life. no exaggeration necessary these are matters of public record I merely report.
…so an observation and a question.
I observe that married I was on a highway to broke and a broken man. Divorced I am happy but more importantly I am healthy and getting healthier. Had my children been taken into my ex’s custody I am doubtful I’d be so healthy and it frankly strains credibility that they’d be anywhere near the thriving children of a stable household they are now.
When we describe the differences in a Christian understanding of marriage versus a modern/secular understanding isn’t it possible that we are describing an “imperative”, i.e.: a “Christian Imperative” … basically a supra-individual, unconscious group mind acting out heuristics that promote the group interest even if occasionally in contravention of individual members’ interests?
And in asking that question while posing it as regards my own experience here are some variables:
-I did not divorce because I was unhappy, I divorced because remaining married was unsustainable
-duplicating the power of the first point…she had decided to divorce so I did first as a legal manuever
-arguably ours was not a Christian marriage in any case … and sans some equivalent of rabbinical courts, I ask: whose is?
-there are meaningful ways you could say she’s gotten somewhere in the years since, but much more meaningful ways you would have to admit she is closed off to any force that would make you think if we stuck it out that it’d of worked … on the contrary if we stuck it out, … disaster is all my reverse parallel universe crystal ball portends … instead I’m here exchanging thoughts with you folks, I’m contributing to industry and owning the hard work of delivering to the world two fully formed adults
-lastly and maybe most importantly I have not as yet decided to remarry … I may remain single … this would seem to technically “bless” my divorce but it is as yet descriptive, should it be proscriptive?
@ Eidolon
You have to remember. Women FEEL things. They can’t necessarily put those feelings into words, much less words they can effectively communicate to a man. Part of the problem is they’re never taught about their nature. Another part is they’re not taught how to communicate with men. Yet another part is they’re told they are good deep down, so they infer every natural impulse they have must be also.
Following on from 8 to 12s diagnoses of Female marriage (and in light of his post on his own site concerning likelihood of Infertility and also Miscarriage) I am put in mind of a reflection of mine from last Friday when I was complaining – whilst being labelled racist – about immigration: I was sitting with three male friends and observed that the total number of children fathered by us was precisely four, which if my arithmetic was correct means that in a century and assuming that a generation is twenty five years that by the year 2113 and if that was repeated throughout the country the population of the U.K. would be reduced form its present 60,000,00 to 3,750,000 – about what it was in the time of the Tudors; and by 2213 to just under 250,000.
Of course that wont happen but if my friends are representative of the white middleclass one can see the middle class just melting away. The next time a woman tells you that it is her body, her choice, it might be worth observing to her that even at the present rate (if my figures are representative) that what she is really saying is that genocide of her (sub)race is acceptable to her. I don’t think female ‘rights’ can stretch that far.
Immigration destroys nations and has been wrecking the usa since the 1840’s. If that makes me racist so be it. Immigration hits the White middle an d lower class the hardest as they don’t have the money to shrug off the economic impact or the IQ to fight off the job pressure. Progressives, marxists etc and what ever you want to call them is 1st and fore most an anti White movement codified by a man who was anti White, anti middle class and anti Christian.
No one really knows of course, but from the bits I read Charles Stanley’s wife (like Benny Hinn’s wife) was plowing ahead with the divorce despite the desire of the husband to reconcile and remain married. Like most divorces, I suppose.
I still think he should have stepped aside as an act of integrity to the rules of the church and more importantly to Scripture. But you kow how these things are. The church board probably looked at the situation and came to the conclusion that he was the innocent party and implored him to stay.
“Then Stanley’s wife divorced him, and suddenly the rule went away.”
Funny how that works.
Let’s just say I get that pride thing now.
“What I’ve heard about it is that she felt he was spending too much time on his business and church obligations and not enough on his family/her.”
Which may be reason #1 why priests in the Catholic church are to remain single and celibate.
@Elspeth said: …from the bits I read Charles Stanley’s wife…was plowing ahead with the divorce despite the desire of the husband to reconcile and remain married…
I still think he should have stepped aside as an act of integrity to the rules of the church and more importantly to Scripture. But you kow how these things are. The church board probably looked at the situation and came to the conclusion that he was the innocent party and implored him to stay.
earl said: “Then Stanley’s wife divorced him, and suddenly the rule went away.” Funny how that works. Let’s just say I get that pride thing now.
Here we have a clear example of the differences between the male and female mind.
Men believe in rules, and that the rules should be applied equally. Giving someone an exemption from following the rules (while forcing others to follow them) strikes men in the gut as being unfair.
Women believe in rules, unless there is some extenuating circumstance. Forcing everyone to follow the rules without making exceptions for each individual’s circumstances strikes women in the gut as being unfair.
“Men believe in rules, and that the rules should be applied equally. Giving someone an exemption from following the rules (while forcing others to follow them) strikes men in the gut as being unfair.”
Such as not allowing women to be moral agents for their behavoir. That’s just more feminist talk.
@Elspeth,
FBC Atlanta is (and was at the time) a mega-church in the Atlanta area with a large staff. The reason Stanley’s divorce was so controversial at the time was because they had exercised the “dismiss if divorce” rule several times in the past, including several cases exactly like Stanley’s–where the husband opposed the divorce, but the wife pushed it and divorced him anyway.
The “special circumstances” weren’t that Stanley’s wife was the driver of the divorce. It was that the church was built around Stanley (and his TV ministry). So, it was tough luck, you’re fired, bye bye for the assistant pastors whose wife divorced them, but Stanley got a pass.
And rather than realize what special situation his wife was in…she decided her feelings weren’t being taken care of enough and decided to divorce him.
There needs to be a war on emotions.
No, no 8to12. You don’t get to do that, say that I said something that I in fact didn’t say at all. Get it right.
I said very clearly that he should have stepped down, but that the church board probably decided that they would set it aside and ask him to say. I do not think he should have been allowed to stay at all.
Quote please where I said that I thought he should keep his position due to “special circumstances”.
You can’t. Because I didn’t.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95314
FH,
I’d like to offer my 2 cents on your question about the possiblility that some marriages appear not be worth saving.
First, I believe that the spouses are called to honor the covenant that is indeed larger than themselves, regardless of the practical implications (e.g., material loss of wealth), even if that means enduring a difficult marriage with a difficult person and for protracted periods of time. This obligation persists with or without children present. I recognize the possibility, as does the RCC, that there are situations where the spouses should be separated from one another, perhaps effectively permanently, but I disagree vehemently the the liberal interpretations the US RCC uses in this regard and its utter abdication of its prescribed duties per the Code of Canon law.
As to the practical implications, I am at the end of the beginning of life as a unilaterally divorced father of two sons, and can tell you unequivocally that as contentious as my marriage was AT TIMES, it was a far better lot for all involved than what we face now. The problem is that men and women do not face the same consequences from divorce legally, hence our current situation.
@Deti
“When a woman cheats, in all likelihood she has checked out of the marriage. The sex with another man is just the last step in that process. She simply has decided she doesn’t see her husband “in that way” anymore. She “loves him but isn’t in love with him”. She has friendzoned her husband. Once that happens, it is nearly impossible for her to be sexually attracted to her husband again. She’s not looking for just some other man to have sex with; she’s looking for a replacement husband. When she has sex with another man not her husband, she in effect has replaced him.”
I don’t think that’s quite accurate. No matter how unfulfilled or unhaaaaapy she might be, women usually just don’t “check out” of the marriage and go looking for men to screw without some external push. Typically, all it takes is a man she finds attractive showing interest in her. Once that happens, the rewriting of marital history begins and the “check out” follows soon after. So women don’t “check out” without first having someplace to “check in” already set up.
I agree with the last part, though. Once that bond is broken with her husband it can very rarely ever be fixed. Proverbs 14:1
@Elspeth,
The point I was making was that it wouldn’t even occur to most men to bend the rules for some but not others, because the “that’s not fair” alarm is ringing in their head. The fact that you came up this as a reasonable explanation for the board’s actions shows that you think like a woman (not meant as an insult).
“ I don’t think that’s quite accurate. No matter how unfulfilled or unhaaaaapy she might be, women usually just don’t “check out” of the marriage and go looking for men to screw without some external push. Typically, all it takes is a man she finds attractive showing interest in her. Once that happens, the rewriting of marital history begins and the “check out” follows soon after. So women don’t “check out” without first having someplace to “check in” already set up.”
I don’t think it’s necessary for a man to first show sexual interest in a woman before cheating happens or can happen. Don’t get me wrong – I agree 100% that wife cheating can happen in exactly the way you describe and certainly has happened. I just don’t see an outside man’s sexual interest as a necessary condition precedent to set the process in motion.
From what I’ve seen and read, most of the time the wife “checking out” is a lengthy process occurring over years. Starts with vague dissatisfaction and annoyance; leading to fights and arguments of increasing intensity; leading to withdrawal and disillusionment; leading to sexual withdrawal; leading to husband and wife both becoming entrenched in separate narratives of the marriage with ever-decreasing amounts of common ground; leading to husband and wife eventually leading separate lives.
Other things leading to this, I think, are that (1) one party loses sexual attraction for the other or attraction was never present in the beginning; (2) the ease of divorce in the modern era; and (3) the greater sexual availability of men to women than women are to men. (On this last point the logistics of sexual infidelity are easier for women because it’s just easier for an average woman to find a willing sex partner than it is for a man to find one, unless he’s gay.)
It’s at that point that wife (and husband, really) are most vulnerable to infidelity. She really didn’t intend for any of this to happen, of course. No woman sets out to marry a man, fall out of love with him, and start looking for another “husband”. A big part of what’s driving this, in my view, is the impermanence most people take toward marriage – “if this doesn’t work out we can always get divorced” and “well, if he doesn’t care, then why should I care”.
Something I forgot: When the wife reaches the point of differing marriage narrative entrenchment and leading a separate life, she is “checked out”. In her mind and heart, she’s a single woman again and is emotionally “divorced” from her husband already.
That’s what impels her to find another man – she’s gotten rid of the first one and is getting ready to receive a second man.
@Elspeth,
You do understand that the board had fired assistant pastors in the past with the exact same circumstances as Stanley–they tried to maintain the marriage, but their wives initiated the divorce.
The question isn’t whether or not Stanley should have stepped down, but rather why didn’t the board fire Stanley?
The reason Stanley’s divorce was so controversial at the time was because they had exercised the “dismiss if divorce” rule several times in the past, including several cases exactly like Stanley’s–where the husband opposed the divorce, but the wife pushed it and divorced him anyway.
So lemme see if I get this straight: the husband goes to the ends of the earth to dissuade his wife from divorcing him and to preserve their marriage in accordance with Scripture – but it’s HE in the end who gets the boot because of HER sin?
Niiiice. How perfectly churchian.
You know what isn’t churchian.
VI. Thou shall not commit adultery.
I get the feelings meme as a reason for divorce…but that is just masking the method to their madness or a cover up to their plans.
I’d bet dollars to donuts…women either divorce because they have another man waiting in the wings or they will get a big payday from daddy justice system. They won’t cut their husband loose unless they have some golden parachute. Adultery 101…pre-approved by Uncle Sam and his legion of cads.
Churches fail to see that women can be just as strategic as men when it comes to implementing a plan…under secret or covers of darkness. Guys usually just have their plans out for many to see.
I guess my larger gripe is not so much about Arterburn–he is a fallen man who has serious baggages that he will have to unpack for the rest of his life–but rather the folks who continue to devour his materials and go to his conferences. I’m all for grace, but that doesn’t mean he is someone who is in any position to lecture anyone about having a successful marriage.
If I want to know more about doing marriage right, I want to hear from the couple who has been married for 50 years. I don’t want to hear from someone who has struck out twice. It ain’t personal, but I want to hear from someone who has done it right and has the bona fides to show for it.
It’s the way of the world, we can talk about it all we like but we are living in the end times, these things are just more of the evidence seen all around us. The wide road is populated by the marriage, divorce, remarriage crowd. Sexual immorality is rampant as a result, it is a continuous state of adultery.
Feminism has given women every avenue they need to rush headlong into Hell and take all those in their vicinity with them. The women we marry are not the same women who divorce us.
The Church has conformed to the feminist movement and given us all kinds of convenient lies as if they were somewhere hidden in the gospel. The Church will have much to answer for, deviating from preaching the truth, exchanging the truth of God for a lie, worshiping and serving created things rather than the Creator.
There will come a day when all these women who have violated their covenant vows because they believed that “God wanted me to be happy” will stand before a just judge and be condemned by their willful deliberate act of treachery.
These women are deluded into believing he will overlook their sins and be merciful because God is loving and forgiving. However it is that very attribute they are counting on that will also condemn them. God is loving and forgiving and as a result he must punish in accordance with his nature.
What a sad and sorry day that will be as they are cast into outer darkness, with no chance left to repent, all due to the hardness of their hearts. No rationalization, excuses or blame shifting will convince him. An eternity separated from the creator…. by selfish choice.
I guess my larger gripe is not so much about Arterburn–he is a fallen man who has serious baggages that he will have to unpack for the rest of his life–but rather the folks who continue to devour his materials and go to his conferences. I’m all for grace, but that doesn’t mean he is someone who is in any position to lecture anyone about having a successful marriage.
Yeah, you’d think that common(?) sense, if nothing else, would tell people that a guy who has been twice burned by the whole marriage thing is really NOT somebody that you would want to go to for advice on how to maintain a lasting marriage (would these same dupes allow a cardiac surgeon who has had his medical license suspended for malpractice due to an extraordinary number of fatal surgeries to perform a heart bypass operation on them?).
Than again, my inner cynic is whispering in my ear right now that maybe, just MAYBE, Arterburn’s debacle of a life is what the majority of brainless sheeple out there have been brainwashed into believing is the IDEAL )or at least the norm to be expected) for marriage today (and heaven knows, many churches out there do nothing to dissuade them from such an idea). It’s hard to come up with any other explanation that even begins to make any sense.
Fee:
You’re seeing more and more Christian leaders, ministers and servants having the same problems as in the larger culture It’s gone on for as long as there has been a church; it’s simply that this is more commonplace now and talked about more now.
In my opinion this is because the Church is becoming more and more like the ambient culture in which it operates and resides. More and more Christians look, act, talk, sound, and conduct their lives as nonChristians in the same cultural environment. And Christians are demanding the right to divorce and remain in their ministry positions and remarry because that’s what nonChristians do.
@ 8to12:
I have never been one to deny that I think like a woman. I do everything like a woman. What’s more, I believe that all women are “like that.” Nevertheless, you misrepresented my position.
You do understand that the board had fired assistant pastors in the past with the exact same circumstances as Stanley–they tried to maintain the marriage, but their wives initiated the divorce.
The question isn’t whether or not Stanley should have stepped down, but rather why didn’t the board fire Stanley?
I agree that they should have fired him. But I believe just as strongly that he should have stepped down.
When I found out I wsa expecting our first, I was singing in the choir of our little church. I was a big part of that ensemble and everyone (everyone, literally) said when I announced that it would be shameful for me to be singing, “It’s okay. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone sins. Sister so and so kept singing when she got pregnant, and she’s 40 years old. She should have stepped down because she knew better but you’re young (21!). yada yada yada.”
They went through all the talking and “do you understand that what you did was wrong, right?” and all that stuff. I finally piped up and said, “No. This is shameful. I will not keep singing, especially since I know I have no intention of leaving this man and I’m going to marry him knowing he’s not a believer. I cannot sing in the church choir. Period.” That hurt me deeply because I really loved to sing, and I’m good at it. It fed my vanity a lot too, which was all the more reason why I needed to stop.
Look, I am nobody, and the church I attended when I was growing up is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but I know something about this on a small scale, what it feels like, and how the fairness argument makes it so that the person in question must have enough integrity to step down when things like this happen.
Charles Stanley should have stepped down the minute it became clear that the church board was more concerned with butts in seats, television ratings, and money. Ultimately, we are all responsible to do what we know is right when others are not strong enough to do what is right.
Amir
I guess my larger gripe is not so much about Arterburn–he is a fallen man who has serious baggages that he will have to unpack for the rest of his life–but rather the folks who continue to devour his materials and go to his conferences. I’m all for grace, but that doesn’t mean he is someone who is in any position to lecture anyone about having a successful marriage.
To many, many people in the modern US church, this would come across as “judgemental”. And that is a very bad thing, to be “judgemental”. One of the Bible quotes that is commonly tossed about – very often by women who have behaved very badly – is “Judge not, lest ye be judged” along with “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”.
Seriously, on some fora (Empath can list a couple) what you wrote would be slammed into the dirt as “judgementalism”, or maybe “legalistic” in a matter of minutes. You’d be sternly told how un-Christian your words are, too. And you’d be reminded that you’re not so perfect, either, and how dare you judge this man who has admitted his error?
I dunno how far this will go. Maybe in the not too distant future turning down one cheese dip in favor of a sour cream dip at a potluck will be denounced as “Judgemental”?
Churchgoing people have been sold a bill of goods: the idea that seeing any difference between any two people’s actions is “judgemental” and therefore bad. And as a closing thought, this is IMO definitely tied in to the “Man UP and Marry The Sluts” notion – how dare a young or middle aged man actually attempt to quantify the risk some former carousel rider poses to him! How dare he look at past actions as an indication of future actions! And so forth, and so on.
deti said: In my opinion this is because the Church is becoming more and more like the ambient culture in which it operates and resides. More and more Christians look, act, talk, sound, and conduct their lives as nonChristians in the same cultural environment.
It’s not just your opinion; it’s observable and obvious FACT.
I seem to vaguely recall some verse of the Bible called Matthew 5:31, which mentioned something about followers of Christ being the “salt of the earth” and that if this salt loses its flavor, then it’s basically useless and should be tossed to the ground and trod under foot. I dunno, I guess either that verse somehow got conveniently “left out” of modern versions/translations of the Bible, or, more likely, the churchian sheeple majority has decided that spiritual salt is as toxic as modern health “experts” proclaim actual salt to be (they’re wrong on that, BTW) and that it should be eliminated from the spiritual diet too.
Elspeth said: Charles Stanley should have stepped down the minute it became clear that the church board was more concerned with butts in seats, television ratings, and money. Ultimately, we are all responsible to do what we know is right when others are not strong enough to do what is right.
This assumes (without any foundation in fact that I can detect based on available evidence) that Stanley differed in any significant way from the church’s board in terms of his reverence for scriptural commandments regarding church leadership and the message of the New Testament. What seems obvious from this whole debacle is that both Stanley and the church’s governing board, probably to no one’s surprise, chose to serve mammon over God.
OOOPS! Fat fingers: make that Matthew 5:13.
@ AR:
“Churchgoing people have been sold a bill of goods: the idea that seeing any difference between any two people’s actions is “judgemental” and therefore bad. And as a closing thought, this is IMO definitely tied in to the “Man UP and Marry The Sluts” notion – how dare a young or middle aged man actually attempt to quantify the risk some former carousel rider poses to him! How dare he look at past actions as an indication of future actions!”
This is exactly what is going on in churches, macro and micro. I’ve heard it said from pulpits and in articles, in so many words that
–you can’t judge her by her past because God makes all things new.
–past sexual conduct does not disqualify a woman from marriage.
–having a lot of premarital sex partners shouldn’t mean a woman cannot get married.
–that’s all in the past. You can’t hold that against her. God forgives her. Why can’t you?
“–you can’t judge her by her past because God makes all things new.
–past sexual conduct does not disqualify a woman from marriage.
–having a lot of premarital sex partners shouldn’t mean a woman cannot get married.
–that’s all in the past. You can’t hold that against her. God forgives her. Why can’t you?”
Someone should point out that has to do with the soul….and that’s only if she has contriton and seeked forgiveness for her past sexual sins. That has nothing to do with the effects of the mind and body.
“Churchgoing people have been sold a bill of goods: the idea that seeing any difference between any two people’s actions is “judgemental” and therefore bad.”
We all know that there is such a thing as bad, worse, worst and good, better, best. The problem isn’t so much with making the distinction between behaviors. The trouble comes when people have to figure out to relate to this other person as a fellow regenerate Christian. I’m not talking about marriage necessarily. Just in general.
Deti,
I’m sorry but this is just driving me crazy, unicorns farting rainbows crazy. I’ll be brief and get right to the point: who exactly is telling you that you can’t judge a woman to be unfit to be your wife because of her sexual past?
Something here just doesn’t add up, not in the world of reality. This is the manosphere we are supposed to be realists. In the world of reality, we have bachelors. Some of those bachelors attend church. Some of them come each Sunday and are well known in the church. So lets say you are one of those bachelors.
Are you going to have me believe that there is some special segment of the church body, some individual members that are going to corner you at worship and put you on the spot and ask a combination of the following two questions: “Why aren’t you married?” and “We have these lovely ladies right here in church, why aren’t any of them good enough for you to marry?” Because I can’t believe that there is anyone at any church body who’s CALLING is to SHAME BACHELORS OF THE CONGREGATION into marrying the former sluts, now born-again virgins. That makes no sense at all…
If any of you bachelors are feeling guilty that you didn’t marry one of the former sluts (now born again virgins) that is a feeling you are imposing on yourself. There is no way you are going to make me believe that anyone at your church is giving you a hard time for being picky and choosy about who you want ot marry.
IBB said Are you going to have me believe that there is some special segment of the church body, some individual members that are going to corner you at worship and put you on the spot and ask a combination of the following two questions: “Why aren’t you married?” and “We have these lovely ladies right here in church, why aren’t any of them good enough for you to marry?” Because I can’t believe that there is anyone at any church body who’s CALLING is to SHAME BACHELORS OF THE CONGREGATION into marrying the former sluts, now born-again virgins. That makes no sense at all…
I’ve attended three churches in the last twenty years, of the self-described “evangelical” type, that have done EXACTLY THAT, and quite overtly, both from the pulpit and in the halls and outside in the parking lots both before and after church. Fortunately, none of their callow shaming met with any measurable tate of success that I could determine. The bachelors in these churches were a whole lot smarter than most people gave them credit for.
IBB,
At a minimum the churchian culture tacitly accepts the idea that promiscuity does not harm a woman’s prospects for successful marriage by virtue of the fact that it will not speak out against the behavior as indeed harmful.
IBB,
“Because I can’t believe that there is anyone at any church body who’s CALLING is to SHAME BACHELORS OF THE CONGREGATION into marrying the former sluts, now born-again virgins.”
Emphasis on “calling.” No, it’s not their calling. Doesn’t mean they don’t do it. And its a lot more subtle than that, at times. Someone may ask “are you married?” and when you say “no” you may get a little raise of the eyebrow, little sucking in of breath. Now my experience is in the black church and people can be blunt. I know of singles’ ministries who cap the age at 30, subtly implying you should be married by now. Which for men may not be the case. Also a lot of churches have emphasis on the family (which means husband, wife, children).
@ IBB:
You have a point. I have been in churches my whole life and never have I once heard any sermon imploring anyone to marry anyone.
What’s more, the idea that a man isn’t free to decline to marry a certain woman because of her past is another thing I have never witnessed.
That said, there is the subtle implication that a woman who has repented, come to Christ and wants to marry should be able to find some godly man willing to marry her and build a family. In so much as there are single men in the congregation who want to marry and single women in the congregation who want to marry, this should be happening. If it isn’t, like all things it’s the man’s fault.
Additionally when the good Christian women get tired of waiting, run out, and take up with the guys outside the church, then that’s also because of the fact that they couldn’t find good men in the church to step up.
Again, I’m not all that familiar with the dynamic, as I was raised in a church and culture where women weren’t pedestalized, although the narrative is steadily creeping in there too.
“That said, there is the subtle implication that a woman who has repented, come to Christ and wants to marry should be able to find some godly man willing to marry her and build a family.”
This is where it comes from, expectation, Elspeth. Ok, now I’m holy, so where’s my good thing? is the logic. Since she’s repented, who are you (oh, man!) to bring up a woman’s past, as someone had already said earlier. Repent means to turn away. Maybe some women haven’t completely turned away yet.
“In so much as there are single men in the congregation who want to marry and single women in the congregation who want to marry, this should be happening. If it isn’t, like all things it’s the man’s fault.
Additionally when the good Christian women get tired of waiting, run out, and take up with the guys outside the church, then that’s also because of the fact that they couldn’t find good men in the church to step up.”
Yes. Once again, expectations.
IBB:
This isn’t done exactly as you describe. And I didn’t see it overtly. It’s much more subtle, more covert. It’s done in so many words, with hints, innuendo and suggestion.
–Him? He’s an older bachelor. He’s probably gay.
–Young deti, it’s around time you get married. You’re a catch. There are lots of young women here you should be considering. (Hamsterlation: There’s a couple of nice looking girls here and a lot of fuglies. Most of them have slept around, sorry about that. We need to get these girls married off NOW.)
–Young deti, you ought to be married now. Sex outside of marriage is SIN. (Hamsterlation: It’s not right that a young man keep his stuff to himself. You need to support a woman with your good income because she deserves it. Besides you’re probably sleeping around with the heathen guttersnipes and that’s not fair.)
–Young deti, don’t marry outside this church. You can’t be unequally yoked. (Hamsterlation: Please marry my daughter or at least take her on a date. I don’t want to have to support her for the rest of my life and watch her moping around here for the rest of hers. I know she slutted it up a little/is ugly as sin, but it can’t be THAT bad.)
–Women make mistakes, you know. You can’t hold those mistakes against them. They’re forgiven, just like you are forgiven your mistakes. If God forgave them, then you MUST forgive them too. (Hamsterlation: GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT SHAME SHAME SHAME)
–A girl can’t be a bodily virgin again; but she can be a born again virgin and reclaim her spiritual purity. That’s what counts anyway, because God looks on the heart and you should too. (Hamsterlation: She’s so far away from virgin she can’t even spell it. But, she prayed the prayer and cried a little and she’s good as new. Please save her from herself and marry her before something REALLY bad happens to her.)
–You can’t hold her past against her because that would be judgmental and you’re not supposed to do that. (Never mind that the church women mercilessly judged church men every single day.) (Hamsterlation: You’re just as crappy as she is. Now man up and marry her because you both need it.)
@ IBB, Elspeth
Head on over to any Churchian site or forums like Boundless.
http://community.focusonthefamily.com/b/boundless/archive/2013/07/17/the-other-side-of-early-marriage.aspx
In fact, I’ll pull up this nice quotes for you from some of the women there:
Any form of “discernment” is EVIL AND WRONG and you’re an arrogant, self-involved jerk for saying such things.
This is the “Christianity” that women are learning today. All I feel for them is sadness.
@ibb
“driving me crazy, unicorns farting rainbows crazy”
that line made my day 🙂
btw, im surprised u never heard the “man up and marry those sluts” from the pulpit. its rampant man. Other women in the church will throw out feelers about the single sluts to the single men. then they will watch your face as u try to get out of the coversation as quick as possible.
@ Elspeth:
“That said, there is the subtle implication that a woman who has repented, come to Christ and wants to marry should be able to find some godly man willing to marry her and build a family. In so much as there are single men in the congregation who want to marry and single women in the congregation who want to marry, this should be happening. If it isn’t, like all things it’s the man’s fault.
“Additionally when the good Christian women get tired of waiting, run out, and take up with the guys outside the church, then that’s also because of the fact that they couldn’t find good men in the church to step up.”
Yes.
This is exactly the dynamic that plays out in churches. Lots of women here, she’s come back to church, she’s praying the prayers. She wants to get married. Why can’t she?
The only things you left out:
1. These women almost always have a past. Sluthood, addiction, abortions, divorce, and children. Many are divorced, some are never married single mothers with bastard children. They have an entire planeload of baggage.
2. Most of them still expect to pull a good looking, wealthy alpha – the kind they used to be married to or have sex with when they were younger and “out in the world”. The men in church are not attractive to them at all.
For these reasons, these women are poor marriage risks. Too much baggage, expectations way too high.
Deti,
Okay, exactly. That is my point. There isn’t anyone who’s CALLING is to SHAME you. This subtle, covert, done in many words with innuendo crap, is all just crap. You are a man, and you don’t have time for crap.
That’s the point I’m making. They are not going to Joeseph of Jackson you out the door if you choose to remain a bachelor or simply reject all the born-again virgins. They can’t force you to marry anyone. There is no group in the church that has any authority over you to make you do anything like marrying a former slut, now born-again-virgin.
If you are “feeling bad” because some of these church members are asking you these questions about your marital status (and the questions put you on the spot), all you have to do is say “Well, I just haven’t found the right woman yet that I know I could love for a lifetime.” Say WOMAN. Do NOT say GIRL. Very important. If you say WOMAN then the person who is irrationally trying to coax you into courting the church sluts will know that you are a MAN looking for a WOMAN and not a BOY that he or she is talking DOWN TO because you only want a GIRL. You have just taken their legs out from underneath them and that is exactly what you want to do. They have to talk to you like a MAN who knows what he wants (and wont have anything less than that) and not a BOY who doesn’t know any better.
That’s what I would do. But at least we are all on the same page now. There is no group at any church who’s responsibility is to SHAME bachelors into marrying sluts. These groups do not exist (officially or unofficially.) So we don’t have to talk about that crap anymore.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the random white knighter who ironically has the username of “Christlike”
For these reasons, these women are poor marriage risks. Too much baggage, expectations way too high.
Even many of those who have genuinely repented of the awful poisons of their past seem to swallow the delusion that having done so gives them a completely “clean slate,” that they can carry on with their lives as if (and expect everyone else to act as if) none of their past ever happened, that there are no very real lingering consequences and baggage as a result of it. When they collide with the harsh reality that this is NOT the case, that God’s forgiveness for past sins does NOT mean being able to avoid dealing with the consequences of them, they become angry, bitter, and defensive. THIS is what we see in so many churchian women (and not a few churchian men) these days when the subject of marriage arises: the idea of God’s forgiveness as being some version of the popular concept of an indulgence.
““Well, I just haven’t found the right woman yet that I know I could love for a lifetime.””
IBB, this stops them?
It should. It did for me at my church. It tells them in one sentence that you know exactly what you are looking for (and that you are open to get married) and when you find the right person, you will grab her. It also says that you have already pre-qualified every single woman in the church and according to you, they don’t qualify. You say so much by saying so little.
Moi
“Churchgoing people have been sold a bill of goods: the idea that seeing any difference between any two people’s actions is “judgemental” and therefore bad.”
Elspeth
We all know that there is such a thing as bad, worse, worst and good, better, best.
Well, we all should know these things, I agree. Problems arise when declaring behavior A as being “bad” would lead to inconvenience for some group of people.
The problem isn’t so much with making the distinction between behaviors. The trouble comes when people have to figure out to relate to this other person as a fellow regenerate Christian. I’m not talking about marriage necessarily. Just in general.
I’m sure some trouble arises in that way. But frankly, making distinction between behaviors really does seem to vary depending on whose behavior is under discussion. Take two hypothetical teenaged boys – one the son of a member of a megachurch and the other the son of the assistant pastor of the same church. Suppose they both get caught shoplifting. Which one is more likely to get a pass, to have the bad behavior glossed over as soon as possible?
Dont’ tell me what ought to happen, tell me what is likely to happen. And anyone who questions the glossing over of Pastor Jones son’s behavior will be accused of what? Judgementalism? “Judge not…”? And if someone quotes from the letters of Paul about the qualifications for office in a church – husband of one wife, family obedient – what response will that produce? “Legalism” for a start, I dare say.
The trouble with watering down standards for some people in some situations is obvious: soon enough standards get watered down for more and more people. Eventually the standards are merely a sham. And then we get far too many modern churches, where never-married women are considered to be “widows”, to pick but one recent example I saw in person.
The truth freeriker, is that most of these women eventually do marry. Some quite quickly in fact. At present, there isn’t some swell of single Christian men refusing to marry non-virgins. At least I haven’t seen it. So they’re getting married. No, not to the men who post here, but they are getting married.
I would like to see churches do a better job of holding these parishioners accountable to the vows they take, what it means to be a committed Christian, and the fact that they won’t be allowed to be led around by the whims of their emotions the same as they did when they were out there in the world. They have to grow up now, do and be, what a Christian is supposed to do and be.
Part of that is suffering for something greater. Yes, sometimes even in marriage. Of course, what most people call suffering today are little more than minor inconveniences.
It was not my intent to threadjack away from the OP. Rather I was attempting to illustrate an issue that I see in churches visited in various places. The confusion of “judging” with seeing plainly.
It’s not “judging” to accept the remorse of the teenaged boy who is caught shoplifting, while insisting that he still must pay whatever penalty has been imposed. It’s not “judging” to point out that a never married woman with a child is not a “widow”, she’s a never married woman. It’s not “judging” to point out that the pastor’s oldest child is a thug, or a slut, if that child is still living under his roof it is not “judging” to question his leadership abilities.
Extreme example:
It is not “judging” Jeffery Dahmer to point out that his in-prison conversion in no way negated the crimes he committed that led to his prison sentence. Converting to Christianity did not produce a “Get Out Of Prison” card. It is simply observing the painfully obvious: whether he really converted or not isn’t the business of men, and that conversion in no way negates the murders he committed so far as human justice systems are concerned.
So to return to the OP: far too many churchgoing people will see advice like this from a twice-divorced man, and will suppress their initial reaction of “Why should anyone listen to him?” because they don’t want to be accused of being “judgemental”. Essentially, far too many churchgoing people today are more worried about whether they are being nice or not, than whether they are behaving correctly.
I wager one could scan the entire Bible and not find any exhortation to “niceness”…
feereker,
Of course they have a clean slate. Christ saves.
Of course they can carry on with their lives.
Can they expect that there will be no lingering consequences and baggage as a result of their past behavior? No. And for those who feel that way, they are delusional.
As Elspeth said, these women will marry. Eventually. They just wont marry you because you wouldn’t have them. Okay, fine. But someone will have them. And they will carry on with their lives.
who exactly is telling you that you can’t judge a woman to be unfit to be your wife because of her sexual past? (from: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/advice-from-an-expert-on-failing-as-a-husband/#comment-95419)
May I interest you in a visit to: http://forums.catholic.com/. The people on that forum, especially the ones who will give you “a hard time for being picky and choosy about who you want to marry,” are quite visible. There are few of them in my own church. If you want to see it taken to an extreme, you can visit http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/, where many members support the idea that a man should be prohibited from marrying if he does not want to marry a women with a sexual past (even if he himself doesn’t have one).
One of my “favourite” female supremacist blogs (http://seraphicsinglescummings.blogspot.ca/) frequently makes it known that only an immature and insecure man would insist on marrying a virgin.
Some people just haven’t learnt the difference between temporal and spiritual.
Why do you have the right to judge someone based on their past? I am curious because the rationale sounds graceless and condemning. Is it? Or does it just sound that way?
And what do they mean by judge someone? Is calling a thing by its name a judgement?
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oblivion,
I have heard the term, but the Pastor saying that in an effort to SHAME the bachelors is (well) an effort in futility. It’s meaningless. It’s just words. Its kind of like the President saying we need to do something about the deficit and then continue to spend more and more money, just meaningless rhetoric. In this sense, talk is truly “cheap.”
But the point you are making does not dispute my point. The Pastor can say whatever he wants about this, can try and shame to his heart’s content. Won’t do any good. Nor does it have any authority. He can’t force the bachelors to give up their bachelorhood to the born again virgins of the church.
My own personal experiences, I haven’t know any Pastors who have done this but I grew up on the East Coast. The majority of the Congregations that I was part of, they were almost all old people. I would say have of the people in the pews were over the age of 65. And the churches had money because when these people died, they would leave quite a bit of their assets to the church. Be that as it may, the “man up and marry the sluts” slogan would have been meaningless in these situations as there were almost no men who weren’t already married and there probably weren’t that many sluts (if any) in the pews. So, whatever.
IBB
As Elspeth said, these women will marry. Eventually. They just wont marry you because you wouldn’t have them. Okay, fine. But someone will have them. And they will carry on with their lives.
What will those lives look like? Will divorce be a feature? How likely are those women to file for divorce in the next 5 to 7 years? Are those women more likely or less likely to file for divorce than women who were not as promiscuous? Given the potential costs, are such women worth the risk?
It is interesting to me that I can easily walk into a church and strike up a conversation with many men and women about many forms of risk – such as possible correlation between high fructose corn syrup consumption and Type II diabetes, or heavy cell phone use and some brain tumors, or texting while driving and traffic accidents, just for example. People will urge each other to avoid unnecessary risk that might bring great harm to them. Except for marrying women who have been around the block, as the old folks used to say. Then the talk often turns to (wait for it) judgementalism and how bad a thing that is.
IBB, the data are clear – some people are a greater risk to marry than others. It’s quantifiable, within some degree of error. Pretending that this isn’t true does no service to anyone, and leads to harm of men and children.
Sorry for another threadjack.
Ellie, very good questions. I’m going to refrain from replying in order to defer to others, such as Elspeth, Earl, Hopeful, Dalrock, etc.
IMO your key question is this: And what do they mean by judge someone?
The definition of the words “judge” and “judgement” is very important.
Ellie,
I don’t think anyone here is trying to judge people Ellie. What most of the men are saying is that they are “judging” whether or not she is worthy to be MY WIFE.
That is a little different. They aren’t doing that to be graceless or condemning. They are doing it to protect themselves. They are doing it to look out for their own best interests.
Would you marry a man who is divorced? Would you marry a man who served a prison sentence? Would you marry a man who has had to go into Detox for alcoholism? Would you marry a man who filed a bankruptcy? These are all judgements you make on him for his past. Men quite often do the same thing.
Now for me, I didn’t worry about whether my wife was virgin or not. That part of her past was none of my concern. I had other concerns (is she a smoker? is she a drinker? does she have a lot of consumer debt? what does she do for a living? what do we have to talk about? does she want children? how many children does she want? where does she want to live? etc), other value judgements that I made and I’m glad I made them. It prevented me from marrying other women who (knowing now what I only partially knew then) wouldn’t have been right for me.
There is no group in the church that has any authority over you to make you do anything like marrying a former slut, now born-again-virgin.
Problem: Women who are waiting until marriage who don’t want to marry a man who will only marry a virgin (even if he is one, too).
At present, there isn’t some swell of single Christian men refusing to marry non-virgins.
They don’t know what the consequences are. They believe, for example, that all STDs can be tested for, and with perfect accuracy. That’s not true. They don’t know anything about increased divorce risk, and when they are told, they say “it doesn’t take into account a changed heart.”
Why is this a problem Marcus? Let her have whatever parameters that she wants.
You have them. She can have them.
@Ellie
Judgment is defined, at least in the religious sense, as condemning the state of someone’s soul. The “judgment” that modern Christians (and the surrounding culture) reference is more of “blunt disagreement.” If you visit a Christian forum thread discussing the rejection of non-virgins for spouses, you will see a smoke screen of “don’t judge” and “you must forgive” being thrown up – what should be noted is that those words are being used in the secular sense, not the Christian sense. I think that is quite revealing as to their mindsets.
Why is this a problem Marcus? Let her have whatever parameters that she wants.
I should have been more clear. I am not against an individual having whatever parameters they wish in regards to a spouse. The issue is that the women I mention reject such men not because they don’t like them, per se, but as an expression of condemnation towards the parameters of those men. In other words, if the men didn’t reveal that they only wanted to marry a virgin, those women would marry them. I find it strange, that’s all. Again, they can stipulate whatever they wish (though it is worth noting their double standard – women can specify, men cannot).
AR,
Well, they might not be worth the risk TO YOU. But as far as all these questions go, they only matter if this woman is YOUR WIFE. If you have already made a value judgement to disqualify her from being your wife based on something in her past, then these questions shouldn’t matter to you.
Ellie:
What we’re saying is that it is perfectly acceptable to assess and take stock of a woman’s past history to determine her suitability as a spouse. In fact it’s foolhardy NOT to do so. Moreover, most men don’t even really know how to assess a woman’s marriageworthiness. The Church teaches you nothing about it.
The problem arises when (usually) men raise some question about a woman’s N or whether she’s a virgin. This is usually met with shrieks of “you can’t JUDGE her! That’s in the PAST and it doesn’t MATTER any more!” Well, true, it doesn’t matter in terms of salvation if it’s confessed and repented. It matters very much when determining whether a particular woman is a good or poor marriage risk.
Eternal salvation does not mean excuse from all temporal consequences.
The problem with “judgement” is it’s expanded outside of its context. In Matthew 7 Jesus talks about judgement on others, specifically in the form of self righteousness:
Yet, in other places decision making (based on judgements) is specifically a logical decision making process — aka “count the cost” from Luke 14:
When you consider that a man is going to be making “judgements” about potential women whether she would be compatible with his in his life and also to decrease his risk of divorce, STDs, previous abortions, and other such psychological issues this is a form of counting the cost.
Most men searching for a husband are not “judging” — being self righteous — to the women for their sexual sin. That is certainly between them and God, and if a woman professes to have repented and is living a life of chastity that is good. She is a sister in Christ.
However, we are going to judge her — through our discernment and counting the cost — because her background presents a risk of divorce and other potential aforementioned issues. The Scriptures are clear that this discernment is a smart idea.
IBB:
I think what AR is saying, and he can correct me if I’m wrong, is that sluthood has society wide ramifications. It’s generally well known that the higher the N the greater the marriage risk she is and divorce risk goes through the roof. Men who don’t know this should learn it, know it, and at least be aware of it so if they accept a reformed slut, they do so with eyes wide open. A guy has the right to know the amount and level of risk he’s assuming.
Marcus,
Huh? Sometimes (quite often), women cannot. No double standard. Here is an example.
I disqualified a woman from being my wife once simply because she told me that she was pro-choice. I didn’t know that at the time. She revealed that. I was surpised (shocked really) that she would be okay with the murder of her own unborn children, but she was. I started to really distrust my own way of evaluating people just by hearing her utter those words.
You know the more I think about, shouldn’t these “reformed sluts,” women who have repented, be more humble? Why the attitude of “I’m holy so where’s my Godly husband?”? Last I checked, humility is required for repentance. Doesn’t that attitude in and of itself tell you (men) that said woman has not repented? Should these women count themselves blessed a Godly man would take an interest let alone marry them?
You know the more I think about, shouldn’t these “reformed sluts,” women who have repented, be more humble? Why the attitude of “I’m holy so where’s my Godly husband?”? Last I checked, humility is required for repentance. Doesn’t that attitude in and of itself tell you (men) that said woman has not repented? Should these women count themselves blessed a Godly man would take an interest let alone marry them?
Yes, exactly.
Moi
What will those lives look like? Will divorce be a feature? How likely are those women to file for divorce in the next 5 to 7 years? Are those women more likely or less likely to file for divorce than women who were not as promiscuous? Given the potential costs, are such women worth the risk?
IBB
Well, they might not be worth the risk TO YOU. But as far as all these questions go, they only matter if this woman is YOUR WIFE. If you have already made a value judgement to disqualify her from being your wife based on something in her past, then these questions shouldn’t matter to you.
So you’d have men blindly marry into dangerous situations, rather than inform them of the cold facts? I guess the suicide rate among divorcing / divorced men doesn’t bother you one bit.
I may be cranky if not downright a misanthrope at times, but if the bridge is out I’m going to tell people “Don’t drive down that road! You’ll have a huge wreck”, rather than go on my way saying, “Well, it’s not my car, or my life that may be destroyed”.
You are attacking the wrong problem. Yes, the situations are dangerous. Yes I care about the suicide rate. Damn straight. Yes, you warn men. But you are giving them the wrong warning. It is not that the bridge is out and driving down the road will give them a wreck. It is instead that the road conditions suck (bridge or no bridge) because all the parameters and checkpoints built into the system to assure the road be at least drivable, have been removed because the government is shut down and all the road repair people are furloughed.
The warning you give men is one of “no-fault-divorce.” The warning you give men is of frivorce. This can happen to any man marrying any woman. Are there increased risks with certain women? Yes. But the damage done to the man from frivorce are very similar regardless if the woman he is marrying had an N of 0 or 100 before he married her. Either way its going to suck for him.
We need to do away with “no fault divorce.” Unitl that happens, the risks are ridiculous no matter her N.
Risk = Probability * Damage
The Damage variable doesn’t really change much based on who a man marries; the Probability variable does vary quite a bit.
IBB
But the damage done to the man from frivorce are very similar regardless if the woman he is marrying had an N of 0 or 100 before he married her. Either way its going to suck for him.
Men will continue to marry. Men’s-fault divorce laws will not go away in the near future or in any forseeable time. Therefore, since marriage caries clear and long-term risk for men, they need to choose wives with care, in order to reduce the danger of divorce. There are facts a man should know, and questions he should ask. Fortunately I don’t have to spell this out for you.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/interviewing-a-perspective-wife-part-i-should-you-open-a-position/
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/interviewing-a-prospective-wife-part-ii/
It can be shown from real world data that the probability of divorce given a woman with an N = 0 is measurably lower than the probability of divorce given a woman of N = 100.
Therefore, men should know that the higher the N prior to marriage, the higher the probability of divorce in 5 to 7 years after marriage. Each woman is an individual, as is each man, and note that there are plenty of cases where high N women remain faithful. It’s a probability, not a certainty. Nevertheless, at the very least, men should go into marriage knowing the risks.
The facts are clear. You may not like them, but that doesn’t make the facts go away.
Because there is no way that men’s-fault divorce will be done away with in any forseeable future. And men will continue to marry.
Anonymous Reader says:
October 10, 2013 at 6:59 pm
And, it is pretty well established that few men can sort out which women will make good wives by the usual compatibility issues. Mentally ill women often seem to be the best women of all, before marriage.
This is the reason we must look at their past, and use available statistics on how each issue affects the divorce rate. Child of unwed mother. Unwed mother. Divorced woman. child of divorced women. All of these are much more likely to divorce than women from stable two parent families. Period.
We men tend to be somewhat arrogant. It is really easy for a man to ignore a million divorces a year, and assume he is special and different and can tell the difference. Divorce lawyers like mwn stupid like that.
innocentbystanderboston says:
October 8, 2013 at 7:27 pm
>>All the divorced women that I know, divorced with the belief that they would never remarry.
>>They were okay with this. That is how miserable they were in their marriage,
Interesting. I do not believe things have changed that much since 1984 to 1993 when I supplied no-fee counseling services to an estimated 1600 men.
In all those cases, au contraire, I never encountered more than a handful of women who did not assume they would either remarry or be in a LTR with the same man. Not one. In fact, they did not file for divorce until they felt they had another man locked in.
And, in many cases they turned nasty towards their ex- right after the new guy dumped her.
innocentbystanderboston says:
October 10, 2013 at 1:53 pm
>> So we don’t have to talk about that crap anymore.
Sort of wrapped up in yourself?
I had forgotten it until tonight. But, the tendency of women to learn their husband is a no good bum only when they think they have found another man has been known for a very long time.
I remember many years ago Dear Abby or her sister got a letter from a woman telling what a no-count worthless bum her husband was. the answer was: “When did you meet the other man?”
@ibb
we need to do away with “no fault divorce.” Unitl that happens, the risks are ridiculous no matter her N.
you hit the nail on the head
Eliminating ‘no-fault’ divorce is never going to happen; society just will not hold people accountable to live up to the marital contract and make them stay married to a person to whom they do not wish to stay married. Besides, not having it would lead to an explosion in the number of false abuse allegations and/or the courts would allow even the most specious claims to satisfy the fault-based grounds (e.g., mental cruelty). The courts will never decide in favor of specific performance for a marriage contract.
What could change behavior is the elimination of two key underpinnings of the current jursiprudence: spousal support and effectively default presumption of maternal custody. Because these dollars flow in almost exclusively one direction (from men to women), and because they are not tied to any proof of breach of contract, they incentivize the beneficiaries (women) to file for divorce. At one time I held the view that spousal support could be allowable if true fault was shown, but as I suggest in my opening paragraph the courts would likely trump up charges so as to keep the money flowing. I suppose I’d leave in an exception for physical abuse and/or adultery as it relates to spousal support, but even these would be better handled by way of a prenuptual agreement specifying liquidated damages. As to custody, the current confiscatory system in place needs to be overhauled; legislation ordering the presumption of shared physical custody would be a step in that direction.
The only hope for saving Christian marriage is to completely and permanently sever it from any civil entanglements. The spouses would not legally be married (except in the ten or so states that still recognize common law marriages). So what? They can form one or more legal partnerships to address matters of mutual advantage (e.g., ownership of property). The state would still be (rightly) involved as it relates to children arising from the relationship, so this would remain a weakness going forward (again, thsi could be obviated somewhat by reforms of custody law and child support formulae). There are some other minor potential disadvantages to being sacramentally married but legally unmarried (e.g., access to employer-sponsored group health insurance), but I can think of no single or set of issues in combination that could not be worked around and/or that would tip the scales in favor of continued state sanctioning of marriage. In short, secular society is actively hostile to the tenets of Christian marriage and does not see it as adding value to the civil marriage, so the sacramental does nothing to improve the civil aspects; the civil ramifications of marriage, with their perverse incentives, actively undermine the sacramental.
@Deep Strength
That passage is not about being prudent, per se, but about the futility of human desires and endeavors.
The solution to this marriage problem is first determine who has the higher smv. If her then get yours higher thu the real virtues:
Build muscle – protect family
Make more money – provide for family
Dress stylishly – contribute to the beauty of creation
Be social especially with good looking women – youre a leader by design and not intimidated by anyone.
Once or if you’re already higher than her stop being a pussy and lead and make demands.. Divorce must always be an option if she refuses to comply. If your a couple points higher than her then it’s simply a negotiation tactic. She won’t dare.
If you try anything like this and your lower on the smv scale it will get very ugly fast.
Mwmm
@ Cane
Of course. The direct meaning is coming to terms with putting God first, thereby laying aside such “human desires and endeavors.”
I love the fact that parables often have multiple hidden messages within them. Being prudent/discerning at the forefront.
hurting,
Then, that’s it.
You have ripped away the under-pinnings of marriage that make it so sacred. You simply can not have both no-fault-divorce and a sacrament of marriage. They are mutually exclusive.
If we can’t get rid of no-fault-divorce, then women can’t ever complain if men stop marrying them. Because men are STOPPING. And this is killing churches, killing the family, bankrupting governments, and killing Western Civilization.
@ eidolon –To expand a bit, I think women also have a tendency to unconsciously assume that other people automatically know how they’re feeling. Maybe they’re able to assess emotions very accurately in other women and they assume men can do this with them? I don’t have experience to know that. But my experience is that, when a situation involving a woman’s husband is causing her emotional pain, she assumes he knows how she’s feeling. If he knows how she’s feeling and doesn’t fix it for her, then he either wants her to feel this way, or doesn’t care that she feels this way. Either way it’s his fault, and either way if she talks to him about it he’ll only make her feel worse about it.
Thank you for this! This sums up exactly how I’ve been feeling about my marriage lately. I was having a hard time putting it into words. Seeing it spelled out like that made me realize that it makes no sense at all.
innocentbystanderboston says:
October 11, 2013 at 12:09 pm
IBB,
I honestly cannot tell if you are agreeing with me or not, so I’ll expound just a bit.
1. I suppose at some point in history, civil marriage (and strict fault-based divorce) served to solidify or at least did not actively undermine sacramental marriage. It has not been thus in generations, and the damage began well before the proliferation of no-fault divorce.
2. I think Dalrock has some stats on this, but changes in the zeitgeist about the permanence of marriage led to an increase in divorce activity before widespread no-fault divorce legislation came into being. Indeed, as I understand it, no-fault divorce was viewed by many at the time as a practical improvement over the ‘song and dance’ manipulation of the old fault-based jurisprudence whereby petitioners put forth (and courts accepted) flimsy accusations of the historical fault grounds such as mental cruelty.
3. I tend to agree with you that no-fault divorce is incompatible with sacramental marriage (at a minimum it is neutral on its face but is likely deleterious as it lowers the bar for nuking a marriage).
4. The other factors I mention above (spousal support in the absence of proof of breach, effectively presumptive maternal custody pursuant to the tender years doctrine and confiscatory adn ill-justified child support schemes) theaten marriages today far more than ‘no-fault’ alone and more importantly would persist even if fault-based divorce became the norm.
5. Even if we returned to a putatively fault-based system in theory, it is highyl unlikely that the courts would uphold truly meaningful standards as it relates to a breach of contract. For example, technically my state is not ‘no-fault’, therefore, petitioners always include allegations of mental cruelty and gross neglect in addition to incompatibility (only considered no-fault if the parties agree to it). My lawyer advised me that essentially the judge would entertain the weakest allegations of misconduct and allow them to be contrued as mental cruelty/neglect, hence fault would be found anyway and the divorce would be granted.
Based on the foregoing, I’d reiterate my argument that sacramental marriage is incompatible with any form of state sanctioned marriage, not just one without the threat of ‘no fault’ divorce. To that end churches should cease cooperating with the state and continue to perform sacramental marriages.
Here is an excellent article on the subject.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/03/stephen-safranek/free-forty-million-americans-privatizemarriage-or-when-premises-collide/
@innocentbystanderboston
Huh? Sometimes (quite often), women cannot. No double standard. Here is an example.
I was stating what those women seem to believe.
AJ
If I helped in any way, that makes me feel really good. I think that dynamic is common but rarely discussed or put into words. It took me a long time to figure out why my wife was feeling and acting the way she was, and that was my conclusion.
I highly recommend a low-stakes discussion with your husband, if you want to change or improve something. Men are typically very reasonable when approached from the perspective of problem-solving, but can be stubborn if you present it as “what you’re doing annoys me, so you have to change,” or if they feel attacked or accused.
Basically try to make it clear that the issue matters to you, but not in an angry or accusatory way. Approach it from a perspective of “this problem exists, can you help me deal with it?” It’s very likely that he will be able to help, and my experience has been that working together to deal with something that bothers my wife makes her feel better and also closer to me. I hope this helps!
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DALROCK, PLEASE CONSIDER DELETING THE PINGBACK FROM WORD OF A WOMAN!
I received the same pingback. Because I have once before had a trojan horse virus download from a feminist site onto my laptop, I NEVER approve such pingbacks without checking out the site first. When I did so just a few moments ago, my anti-viral software detected a trojan horse virus trying to download from that site.
Readers: BEWARE! Do not click on that link.
People, it’s obvious that this site’s pingbacks are going throughout the sphere. For what purpose, I don’t know. Please spread the word to other sites if you see this pingback.
Also, D., please delete these comments from me if you delete the pingback. Thanks.
Wow. I just posted a response on her site. No Trojan but I am at the office and we have super-duper anti virus software stopping anything and everything that possibly be downloaded. Its liek I am blogging in one giant condom.
Actually, I am kind of surpised Word of Woman could set that up. As far as I could tell, her blog is just another forum at wordpress. It isn’t had my Single Sign On authentication from wordpress, didn’t have to sign up for anything. Perhaps we should let sysops at WordPress know that she is using their site for malicious activity?
That ping back was sent to virtually everyone of the larger manosphere sites. Something is afoot. I have emailed Jack from Viva La Manosphere and mentioned it to him.
Well, I am running a scan on my PC, and sure enough, malware did download from that site. That’ll teach me not to use my PC. I know that my iPad is safer. Anyway, the ping back is on most manosphere sites now and also on most of the ladies’ auxiliary sites. Warn others.
So, this is what I now have on my PC, according to Kapersky:
HEUR:Trojan.Script.Iframer
Lovely. Freaking lovely. I went back to that wordofawoman site on my iPad and there are no ads that I could see, so apparently we have the blogger to thank for the Trojan.
Seems to me that WordPress should be informed of what appears to be a deliberate attempt to spread malware.
How do I know if her site is hosted by wordpress? It doesn’t say wordpress in the address. I’d be happy to contact them if they are the hosts.
Well, hmm, now I am not sure. There is a comment by InnocentBystanderinBoston on her 20/20 posting. The green square gravatar for IBB’s comment is the same on WoaW as on WordPress sites. I assumed that only WordPress uses that scheme, but that could be wrong.
The URL is just http://wordofawoman.com/
AR, you probably shouldn’t have put the link! Maybe ask Dalrock to remove it.
Anyway, I found a site where you can look up who is hosting a particular website. Wordofawoman is hosted by wordpress/automattic, so I filed a complaint with them. I will let everyone know when/if I hear back from wordpress.
Why does it always have to happen to me?
WordPress is a blog software package that can be installed and run on your own server (without the intervention or support of WordPress.com). The thing worth noting is that it can be modified by the user/installer.
Her/their site was registered in 2011, so it doesn’t seem to be something set up to leverage the recent news coverage.
You know what else is really suspicious? If you visit her site, the post that generated all the ping backs is just a few words about how there is this evil thing called the manosphere, and then a list of blog names that link to random articles on those blogs. Usually if you want to point out a blog to your readers, you link to the main page, which doesn’t generate a ping back. You only link to a specific article if you want to highlight something the author said in that particular article. But she very purposefully hyperlinked the blog names to random articles just so that ping backs would be generated. And followed.
This back and forth chat about malware is sad. This reminds me of being in Silicon Valley for meetings. Things went great. In the car… about to leave, the radio button went to a sickening interview with Dr. Greg Smalley. The ‘mal’ (like malware) is built into the name. His voice ‘sounds’ so friendly, but like malware, taking action on the data can cause disruptions.
Is the supply of digital money infinite? Imagine a world where someone could afford to hire, say, four full-time people to moderate the visibility of everything you (that is FOUR to ONE) post, share, find etc when you’ve got a screen that your eyes can see. Impossible? You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Think small: Ask WordPress customer service solve this. Think like an honest deca-billionaire, but do what works on a smaller budget: (Wait, that’s what’s been missing). http://wp.me/p3P5mL-b
Marcus,
It occured to me Friday night that feminist blogs infecting people’s computers with malware and viruses makes perfect sense IF (and only if) the feminist is certain she can get people in the manosphere to find her blog. Of course they would want to do this.
Feminists do not want to argue with people in the manosphere. All feminism has is ideals and feelings. They don’t have facts, reality, or logic. So arguing would be an effort in futility. Now if the people in the manosphere had ASSETS, then feminists would use the power of government and get lawyers and try and take their wealth/earning power from them. They have none of those things (or they took their wealth and converted it into something only THEY can make use.) Okay so the next step would be for the feminists to use the power of government to silence the manopshere. They don’t want them to have any broadcast medium. How does the government do that with the internet and thousands of different blogs (where the hosts are using free software and aren’t even paid?) Can’t shut them down. So what is left?
Attack their computers. If you can’t use the power of government to silence those whom you could never defeat in an argument, find a way to silence them by doing something to their technology, their portal to the internet. So at this point, the manosphere to should avoid (utterly) any feminist blogs for fear of what happened to Mary would happen to them.
“When you married your husband, he was unsure of himself as a man and was unskilled as a husband.”
Oh dear. I could never! Lol!
Where are the real men, my mother asks….
Modern church apologetics exposed, check out:
Once Married Always Married http://oncemarried.net
ha! ~ “once married always married” – inversely proportional to – “once saved always saved”.
Its even been jokingly called; ‘Once damned always damned’
http://oncemarried.net
But jokes aside, many of the arguments for OSAS are applicable to Once Married Always Married
I break down Lingerfelt’s pathetic advice line by line over at The Red Pill with the proper answers:
http://en-us.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/28acku/some_people_just_never_learn_divorcing_after_16/
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