Tag Archives: dating

Is Being Virtuous Attractive

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One of the questions that comes up in different ways is as follows:  Is being a virtuous man attractive to women?

Before I answer that let’s clear up a few things.

First of all it should be noted that attractiveness itself is not a virtue.  Being attractive to women is not a virtue.  Being “hot” is not a virtue.  There are plenty of non-virtuous men who are attractive to women.  We see this all the time.  Heck a common complaint is that women are attracted to the “bad boys”.  It’s a common complaint because it’s often true.

There are men who don’t treat women well who are attractive to women.  There are men who are mean and insensitive who are attractive to women. There are men who live dangerously in one form or another who are attractive to women.

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Your Money And Dating (Plus Bonus Material)

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The other day I was happened on a video win which Dave Ramsey was talking with Anthony ONeal about a recent dating experience he had.  First a quick background in case you are not familiar with Ramsey and his people.  The short version is that they help people get out of and stay out of debt.  Anthony works with younger folks and is a young single man.  One of the keys to getting and staying out of debt is having a budget . . . that you actually follow.  I’ve talked before about as a single person having a “dating” line item in your budget.  Suffice it to say that if you are single and want to date, then why not have a budget for that.

At any rate, here’s the story.  Anthony goes out with a young woman on a date.  They have a good time.  At the end of the date they both want there to be a second date.  The woman suggested that she would really like to go to a particular restaurant in town. Anthony says he will look into it.

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Lies Single Christians Believe

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The last couple of blogs I’ve been writing about the idea of not lying.  It’s funny even to type that.  But as we’ve been discussing, this is not always as simple as it seems. We’ve talked about not lying to ourselves, not lying to others, and not lying to other singles.

In the world of Christian singleness there are a ton of lies.  There are lies that the church has told singles, lies the enemy has told singles, lies that singles tell themselves, and lies that our current culture tells them.  I’ve written a lot about these over the years.  Rather than try to sum up that many posts in one new one I’m going to just list some and link to places where I’ve tried to be more honest and straightforward with the truth.  The list is not exhaustive and in fact if you think of more put it in the comments.  I’d love to see what I’m missing.  So here we go.  Lies singles have been told, thought and/or believed:

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It’s Not You, It’s God And Other Lies Christian Singles Tell

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I’ve been writing some posts about how to stop lying, why it’s important starting with not lying to ourselves and to others in general.  Today I want to bring this back into the topic of singleness for a couple of posts.  Today I want to talk about how to not lie as a single and next time I’ll list some lies that single are told and often believe.

Before I dive in I want to say that I’m writing from a Christian context but that basically all I’m going to say here is just basic morality and good emotional health.  The fact is that God created us to be emotionally and mentally healthy and to be in right relationship with each other in all circumstances.  Sin of any kind wrecks that.  Which is why we are in the world that we are.  Lying is one of those sins.

Here are some lies I think singles tell each other.

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Meekness Vs Weakness

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Recently I’ve been thinking some about virtue.  That is, what is virtuous and what isn’t.  For example, I’ve written about how being “nice” is not a virtue while being good is. All of this may seem like semantics or splitting hairs but it’s more than that.  How we view these things impacts how we live our lives.  It impacts how we view ourselves and our context, including if our context happens to be singleness.  I want to tackle a few more of these thoughts in the context of singleness.

Today I want to talk bout the idea of meekness.  Meekness is indeed a virtue.  So much so in fact that Jesus says in Matthew 5 that the meek shall inherit the earth.  But we are very confused in our culture, even in our Christian culture, about what meekness is.

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Nice Is Not A Virtue . . . Or Attractive

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The other night I was perusing some old videos of a great teacher named Bishop Fulton Sheen.  He is actually really entertaining.  In this particular video he was talking about the difference between nice people and awful people.  At one point he said this, “A nice person who drinks too much is an alcoholic.  An awful person who drinks too much is a drunkard.”  It’s funny and it’s brilliant.

One of the things I’ve tried to help guys with here over the years is the idea that your goal is not to be a nice guy.  In fact I’ve said that you need to just quit being the nice guy.  I’ve talked about avoiding the nice guy trap.  I’ve talked about how women say, “He’s a nice guy but . . . ” when talking about a guy they are not attracted to.The bottom line is that women are not attracted to nice guys.   I’ve shared all of this from the perspective as a guy who has in the past, and in fact still, struggles with being the nice guy.

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Singleness Choices, Consequences and Opportunity Costs

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One of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately as I’ve been reading some scripture is  idea of choice in the face of different contexts.  The particular scripture that started this thought was 1 Peter 2:13-20.  Here Peter instructs even servants to submit to their masters. . . even the bad ones.

Now obviously our culture and history has a lot of impact on how we read that.  But Peter’s point isn’t that slavery is good.  Or that unreasonable masters are ok.  The point is that regardless of my circumstances and context, I’m called to act as Christ would.  Peter and the early Church Fathers backed this up with their lives.  They actually did endure extreme injustice with joy.  In reading their writings, and writings about them, you can’t really help but be amazed by it all.

This is true for every area of our lives of course.  Our income level, our job, what country and situation we live in.  But for the sake of this blog it also relates to singleness, dating and marriage.

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Charlize Theron, Tim Tebow, and The Single Christian

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So recently Charlize Theron stated in an interview that she was shockingly single.  She said she was available and that someone just needed to grow a pair (Christian leaders would say “Man Up”) and ask her out.

As soon as I saw this story I started laughing.  I laughed for two reasons.  First, I knew that a bunch of people would ask her out through various means and second, that she was completely full of it.

And . . . that is exactly what happened.  A good looking man from Kansas City (shout out to my home town) sent in a video asking her out.  She signed a picture for him.  Uh yeah, not what he had in mind.  You can see both her original statement and the guy asking her out in this video here.  It’s great.

There is so much great material here it could probably be 5 posts but I’m going to break it down in one and look at what we can learn from it.

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The Myth Of Reformed Romance

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Have you ever gone into the Christian Fiction section in a bookstore.  It’s sort of unbelievable.  First of all, I still have not figured out what exactly counts as Christian fiction.  Why do we have our own section – why can’t it just be in the fiction section but written by Christians?  Is there a Jewish fiction section??  The truth is that we have our own section because we want it, and we are the only people that would possibly read it.

But the most disturbing thing about the Christian fiction section is the focus on what can best be described as Christian romance novels.  It’s incredible.  I would wager that close to 70% of the books in this section fit that category.  Probably more.  More amazing is that of those romance novels, probably 80% are either western or amish. Talk about a limited audience.

We’re in obvious need of better literature but that isn’t why I bring this all up.  I bring it up because rather than lead in what love, marriage, and singleness looks like (let alone what good literature looks like) we in western Christian culture have adopted what the world says and then arranged our theology and practices to accommodate it.  The impact of this runs much deeper than we realize and impacts not only Christians but everyone else.

We have made romance the thing.  We don’t say that directly of course. We’re more “holy” than that. Instead we couch it in what I call Reformed Romance.  This is where we sort of combine secular romance and shaky Calvinism.

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Modesty, Lust and Attraction

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One of the fun things about writing this blog over the last few years is the questions, thoughts and ideas that readers bring via comments and emails.  Today I wanted to write a post in response to an email question I received a while back.

A young lady wrote in and asked:

I want to know why modesty in dress is considered so important for men’s purity of thought.

I dress modestly. I have no problem with that. Doesn’t bother me. . .

But, I don’t really believe that normal, average women are physically appealing to men when the women who men want to look at are strippers, porn stars, prostitutes and lingerie models. The women who men pay to see are surgically enhanced with silicone parts and fake hair, nails, tans, noses, breasts and eyelashes. That’s not what most average women look like. We don’t meet that physical gold standard of beauty or physical attractiveness.

So why do we have to worry about men lusting after us when we’re not the ones they want anyway? They’re looking at the iPhones, not me or other women who are around.

This email actually raises several different questions and thoughts.  We are talking here about modesty of dress, men lusting, how attraction works among other things.  Let me address a couple of points here that might be helpful.

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