Tag Archives: God

Managing Attraction – I Can’t Help What I Feel

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Do you remember who you were attracted to back in your high school days.  Even maybe middle school?  I sure do remember.  I even had a list in middle school – a top ten list. Haha and all ten were so out of my league so to speak.  I didn’t understand how anything worked.  I just knew who I was attracted to and that I wished they were attracted to me.  I spent most of early to mid adolescence in that place.

But here’s an interesting thing.  When you are all “into” someone, they become even more attractive.  It’s as if our attraction scale slides based on how bad we want someone.  This leads to the feeling of “the one” or of “one that I can’t live without”.  I have a post coming soon to talk more about that idea, but for today I want to focus on a different side of attraction.

As I’ve stated, and fully believe, the feeling of attraction is not a choice.  You either feel attraction or you don’t.  It’s not a conscious in the moment decision.  It just is.  I believe we can do things to be more or less attractive in a moment to someone else (more coming here as well) but I don’t think I will myself to feeling attraction for someone.

However, we can manage what we do with attraction.  Attraction does not require a particular action.  And just because we don’t feel attraction (especially 100% attraction) doesn’t require inaction.

Today I want to talk about the first part, because honestly it’s maybe more important.  Just because you are attracted doesn’t mean you have to act on it.

I’ve had a lot of people (probably more women) tell me something to the affect of, “I can’t help what I feel.”  In other words, I’m attracted to this person and therefore I am going to be with them.  This is a very immature way of handling it.  An adolescent way really.  (No offense to our many fine adolescents 🙂 ).  It is not how you make a mature decision on who to marry – which as a Christian adult (read 18 and over) should be the goal of dating.

This is dangerous on so many levels.  First we should not be controlled by our feelings and desires.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t count.  They do.  But I put my feelings and desires up against the Truth of the scriptures and teachings of the Bible and Church.  I don’t just act because I feel.  This is a part of what it means to be mature.

Paul speaks to this when he says in 1 Corinthians 6 when he says that he will not be mastered by anything.  He is talking about sexual immorality but it’s true for all things. The idea is that while I might feel something or desire something, I don’t HAVE to act on that.

This is where the list of qualifiers I mentioned a couple of weeks ago comes into play. Attraction (whether its creating it or being attracted) opens the door.  It means it’s time to find some stuff out.  If I’m attracted that means I need to find out more.  That’s all it means.

If we don’t bring the feeling of attraction under our control and under the Lordship of God we are setting ourselves up to fail in all sorts of different ways.

  • We can end up dating/marrying someone we know we shouldn’t.  I lost count a long time ago of the people I’ve watched date people they said they never would, simply because they “can’t help what they feel.”
  • We can waist our time pursuing someone we know we wouldn’t marry.  Hard to find the right person while dating the wrong one knowingly.
  • We can set ourselves up to consumer date.  In other words, “I’m not as attracted today so I break up” or “I met someone more attractive so I moved on”.
  • If we do get married we set ourselves up for an affair.  If I “can’t help what I feel” then  what happens when after being married for a while I meet someone else that I’m attracted to?  That will happen you realize.  There are a lot of attractive people.

Attraction matters.  It matters for sure in our context that we live in.  I don’t think we can pretend that it doesn’t.  I think a bunch of verses about beauty fading probably aren’t going to change that.  We aren’t going back to arranged marriages. But while attraction is the starting point its not the ending point.  It’s probably going to be part of the process, but it’s not the end goal.

I want to say more about managing attraction.  Things like how much attraction do you have to have, how do we help ourselves be more attractive so to speak, more on how to flee when you are attracted but shouldn’t be, and some ways to quit comparing everyone to the mystical 15 that I talked about last time.  I’m even going to give a couple of new “qualifiers” that you should look for in someone’s character when considering marriage.

But for today, how driven by attraction are you?  Are you and adult about it, or an adolescent?  Do you control what you do with it, or are you controlled by it?

My Picker Is Broken

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One of the things I’ve heard from several people when it comes to dating is the words, “I think my picker is broken.”  In other words, “I keep picking the wrong people to be with.”

There can be a lot of reasons for this and a lot of different results.  We can can keep getting into relationships with people that we shouldn’t or keep chasing people that we can’t seem to “get”.  Some of it might be self sabotage for various reasons.  But a lot of it has to do with misunderstanding and/or mismanaging attraction.

As I’ve said a lot, attraction is not a conscious in the moment choice.  But it matters and in a big time way.  I believe its not so much that our picker is broken as it is that our attraction meter is broken.  I mean this in several ways.

For starters we need to understand that our attraction scale is skewed.  This is true for both how we see the opposite sex and typically in how we see ourselves.  Let me explain.

Let’s say there is an attraction scale from 1-10.  1 would be extremely unattractive.  10 would be extremely attractive.  This is maybe more straightforward for how guys see women because it’s more a physical thing, but the scale works for women as well, just in a different way.

I think there are very very few 1s and 2s and also very very few 9s and 10s.  Most people fall in between.  In fact it is my contention that most people fall between 4 and 7 but maybe I’m just an optimist.  There is a lot of good news in this.  For one, it can be subjective. While it might be true that a 10 is a 10 to just about anyone, one persons 5 could for sure be another persons 7.  Second we can do things to move up or down in that scale.  Maybe a six can’t be a 10, but presentation can sure make them a 7.  You get what I’m saying.

But the bad news is that this scale is not only subjective, it’s also based on context to some extent.  Here’s what I mean by that.  100 years ago if you lived in say St. Joseph Missouri (a town of about 70,000 people) you would only meet people from there.  So your context of 1-10 was sort of dictated by that.  But then came ease of travel – specifically highways and airplanes.  Now I could view people from everywhere.  This skews the scale.  As a female friend of mine once said, “the great thing about it is, in California I’d be a 6 or 7 but in St. Joseph I’m a 10”.  I remember laughing about that – there was some truth to it.

But now we have a bigger problem.  We have hundreds of channels and of course the internet.  So now the context is the world – every picture, book, story, movie and perversion.  We even have what I call the off the scale 15.  The 15 is the touched up model or the movie star guy.  It’s not real, and yet we’ve spent our whole life viewing that as the 10, when really it’s the 15 – it’s not even actually on the scale.  So our scale is skewed and we need to begin to figure that out.

This leads us to the second problem.  We have this idea that in order to marry someone, we need to be “perfectly attracted”.  We need our “soulmate” so to speak.  Not only should I be 100% attracted, but I should always feel that way.

This makes us eliminate good people that we are actually pretty dang attracted to. Remember most of us are not a 9 or 10 and we are certainly not a 15.  And yet that has become the prerequisite for marriage.

This is seriously frustrating for many of us.  We meet people that have the qualities that we are looking for, but we rule them out because we aren’t attracted enough (read perfectly attracted).  Notice I didn’t say not attracted at all.  We are at least somewhat attracted to all sorts of people.  We need to own this!  While it might be fine to say I don’t want to marry someone I’m not attracted to, it’s not the same thing to say I don’t want to marry someone I’m not 100% attracted to 100% of the time.

This is where it comes back to the picker problem.  When we keep looking for the perfect attraction, when we do feel that way, all else flies out the window.  This is part of why so many women end up with the guy who has none of the qualities they are looking for.  They are attracted so it’s now time to rationalize everything else.  Or it leads to the guy chasing the girl who won’t ever say yes, but dang it, he’s 100% attracted to her, so he has to keep acting on it.  And for many Christians it means just picking no one.  I’m attracted to the wrong people so I just won’t be with anyone.  While better than being married to the wrong person, it’s not a good long term solution.

So what do we do?  How do we manage attraction?  I’ll say more about this soon.

By the way, this doesn’t even take into consideration that most men don’t even realize what women are attracted to at all (nor do a lot of women).  

But I really believe the first step is asking some hard questions.  What is your attraction scale? What type of decisions do you make out of that?  Where do you see yourself on your scale?  How do you know where you are? How attracted do you need to be to act on it? To stay with it?

Can You Marry Someone You Don’t “Love”

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I’ve been so blessed over the last couple of years as I’ve shared some of these ideas about singleness to engage a lot of different people.  Young singles, older singles, married people, pastors among others.  During one conversation with some people a woman said, “I don’t want to marry someone I don’t love.  I don’t think you should do that.”

There are so many angles on this idea of being “in love”.  There is the obvious stuff about romantic love vs. sacrificial love.  I get that.  Here’s the funny thing.  Married people (and I mean people who have been married for a while) will almost always tell you it’s not about romantic love.  I can’t count the times someone told me that.  And the thing is, I got it then and I get it now.  But I always chuckled because if pushed, none of them got married to someone that they weren’t “in love” with.  So while that might be true in marriage, and while it can bring perspective to a single person, it’s tough to work through and most haven’t.

Really we have to define “in love” but I’d like to back up a couple of steps.

We need to first own what I talked about a couple of weeks ago.  This idea that while there are things we are looking for in a person (such as a Christian, smart, fun, has a job, driven, likes sports . . . whatever else) those are really qualifiers.  What I mean is that what we want is someone we are attracted to who also has those things.  We need to own up to this because when we don’t, we are just in our own way.

What this woman was saying is I don’t want to marry someone I’m not attracted to. That would be a fair statement. But frankly that doesn’t have much to do with love.

We need to keep two very important things in mind.  Loving someone is not a feeling and attraction is not a choice.

Both attraction and love are real.  Here’s the good news.  When you love someone, I think attraction can grow, and attraction can lead you to love someone.  But when we confuse the two all the time it can keep us single and/or make us bad spouses if we do get married.

Love is a choice.  I can choose to love literally anyone.  This is why it’s a command.  Jesus is not commanding you to feel something. Jesus isn’t saying, “Be attracted to God with all your heart. (Yes I get that we should be and one day will be).  He’s not saying, “be attracted to your enemy.”

Think about this, everyone’s favorite little marriage verses, like, “Husbands love your wife as Christ loves the church”, or “Wives submit to your husbands” have nothing to do with attraction.  Most of the people that Paul was writing to were married through arranged marriages in one form or another.  Not all certainly but the point is that those commands aren’t based on how you feel about it that day.  Love is a choice.

Attraction is not a choice.  Here’s what I mean by that.  As someone I was team teaching with put it a few weeks ago,  Attraction is not an in that moment conscious decision.  Read that again.  Am I saying attraction can’t grow?  No.  Am I saying that you can’t lose attraction?  Of course not.  What I’m saying is that you don’t go out and say, “I’m going to feel attraction for this or that person.”  In that moment you either feel attracted or you don’t.

Now I have a post coming about attraction and how what I’m going to call our attraction meter is completely hi-jacked. But the first step is acknowledging that it matters.  The question is not does attraction matter, but how much should I allow it to matter.

If the question is, can I marry someone I don’t love, then the answer is well sort of.  But if you get married you are commanded to love them so you might want to figure it out.  On the other hand if the question is can you marry someone you aren’t attracted to, the answer is clearly yes.  The hardest part about this for the single person (the part that no married person likes to admit) is that to do so would mean you’d first have to date someone you weren’t attracted to.

Am I saying that you should marry someone you aren’t attracted to?  Not really.  I didn’t. But you could.  What I’m saying is at the very least, own that you are looking for attraction.  I’m saying who you marry is a choice – attracted or not.  Really you could choose to marry a lot of people irregardless of your attraction level – many of whom would have the qualities you say you are looking for.

I’m not saying we should ignore attraction.  In fact I’m saying the opposite.  We need to understand it – what we are attracted to and why, what makes us attractive to the opposite sex and why, and what to do about it all.

How attracted do you need to be to marry someone?  To go on a date?  Which is more important to you – your attraction to someone or the qualities you are looking for?

Should A Single Person Have A Kid On Purpose

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This fall as I was helping to teach a four week course on singleness at our church (note, Way to go church!), we got asked a question that I had never thought about before.  And believe me I’ve thought about a lot of angles on this thing the last few years.

The question was essentially this: “Should/can single people adopt children? And what about artificial insemination?”

To be honest I was not ready for the question.  There were two thoughts that came immediately to my mind that made me want to lean yes.  First, let’s be honest, there are a lot of kids that are in really bad situations.  In fact, in our current culture, more women have their first kid out of wedlock than in it.  Would it really be worse for them to be with a good Christian single parent?  Really?

Secondly, there are a lot of women, and many men who desperately want to have kids.  I believe this is biological as well as spiritual desire.  Heck, we are supposed to go and multiply.  That’s one of the first commands of the bible.  It’s natural to want to do that. We’ve of course completely separated this from sex (which we’ve already separated from marriage) in our culture.  But that doesn’t make the base desire bad.

But after thinking about it more, I have big reservations.

The first big question we’d better ask ourselves is what are our motives?  In other words why is it that you want to be a parent?  While it’s great to have that desire, it’s really not about you.  It’s not about meeting some sort of emotional desire or fulfilling a dream you’ve had of your lineage going forward.  It’s about sacrifice and love.  You will be the number one influence (good or bad) on that person’s life.  That is not to be done out of some sort of personal need.

Secondly we need to understand that there is an order to things. We’ve kind of been sold in our culture that we can skip parts of the order.  Go ahead and have sex without being married.  Live together before you get married.  So why not go ahead and be a parent.  I can’t find someone to marry, or maybe I don’t even want to do the “spouse” thing, but I want to have a kid.  Why not just go for it?

But this is flawed thinking.  And it’s made worse by the idea that we can do what we want by ourselves.  In other words, the whole “I don’t need a man/woman” mentality.  But to be married and have a kid the right way, you actually do.  That’s part of the deal.  That’s the way it’s supposed to be.  It’s one thing to have messed up the order by sinning and have a kid as a result, it’s another to go out and create it on purpose.

Third it’s either better for a child to have both of his parents or it’s not. Most people believe that a stable two parent home where both people are married is the best place for a kid to be.  Now that doesn’t mean that if a kid doesn’t have it that he can’t do well.  If that was true we’d be in real trouble as most kids don’t have that these days.  But just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.  The truth is that the number one thing you can do as a parent is love your spouse.  That comes first.  Kids know.

So what does all this mean practically when answering the question?

I understand there are strong emotions involved here, but here’s what I think.

I think under no circumstance should you as a single person go out and on purpose get pregnant artificially or any other way.  This to me is the most clear answer.  Choosing to go out and get pregnant and bring a kid into the world with only one parent is wrong.  To me that’s about you, not about what’s best.  That’s choosing on purpose to bring a kid into a single parent home.

What’s less clear is the adoption question.  I think that you could make a strong case for adopting an older kid that is stuck in the system so to speak.  But I think we should keep in mind that there are a lot of great ways to help kids without adopting them.  You could be a foster parent.  You could invest in the lives of kids through an outreach ministry.  You could let a kid that is in trouble live with you for a time.

I had a close friend who met a refugee family in our city.  There was one young kid who my friend wanted to help get a good education.  He offered their family a place to live in a good school district.  They said yes, but then bailed.  But he went ahead and took the kid in for two years while the mom got things straightened out.  He sacrificed a ton for this kid. But once the mom was in a better spot, the kid went with her.  My friend never adopted this kid, but the impact was huge.  It was about the kid, not about my friend’s desire to be a parent – even though he does have that desire.

My point is if you want to help a kid in a bad situation, there are a lot of great ways to do that, in which you could have impact.  You can be a parental figure without being a parent. The number one point is this: It should be about the kid, not about you.

You’ve Met Who You Say You’re Looking For

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So lately you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting quite as much.  Part of the reason is that I’ve had a couple of different speaking engagements.  And since, like most of you, I have a real day job, my time has been limited and I wanted to speak and share well which takes prep time.  But one of the benefits of this is that whenever I get to share with groups, it makes me think about things in new ways.  It also leads to new questions from people who are smack in the middle of singleness.  So I’m looking forward to sharing some new thoughts, as well as some new angles on old thoughts.

One thing that got brought up at each engagement was the idea of who it is that we are looking for.  This is kind of an interesting question.  I know for me, that sort of changed at different times.  The basic questions are things like, “I don’t want to marry someone I don’t love.”  “I can’t seem to find a ‘real’ Christian.” “Should you marry some one that you can live with or someone that you can’t live without.”  Those are all upcoming blogs but I want to start with something more simple today.

I asked each group to give me a list of things that they were looking for.  Now understand that these were mix gendered groups with diversity of age and experiences so there were a lot of answers.  Here were some:

  • A Christian
  • A leader
  • Someone who is compassionate
  • Someone that likes athletics
  • A gentleman (lady)
  • A guy who knows his bible
  • Someone who loves their family
  • Someone who has a plan
  • Someone who is driven
  • Someone who wants a family
  • Someone who sees finances the way I do
  • Someone who sees politics the way I do
  • A guy with a job
  • Has a balanced life – work/life balance
  • Dependable
  • Respects people
  • Affectionate
  • Interested in me – wants to know me
  • Educated

I could go on, but you get the idea.  We all have some sort of list.  We have things that we want in another person.  Some are a big deal to us and others are kind of negotiable.  But most of us have a list.

But here is the truth about our list.  Most of the things on it are qualifiers not attractors. What I mean is that we can say, “I want someone who is a ‘real’ Christian” but what we mean is “I want someone who I’m attracted to who also is a Christian.”  I know this is true because if it wasn’t then everyone at my church would be married, but as it stands only about half of them are.

Now your list is actually important.  The list is what keeps you from marrying someone just because you are attracted to them.  Or at least it should.

But you can meet someone who has everything on your list but it probably won’t matter if you aren’t attracted to them.  A woman can say I want a Christian man who is serious about his faith, who is a solid guy, who is smart, has a job etc.  The thing is I could introduce you to fifty of those people right now.  As I said to one group, “If that is what you are looking for, look around the room, pick someone and get married.”

That might be ok, but the deal is you’ve got to own it.  Because if you don’t you end up running in a circle and basically sort of start becoming dishonest.  You can say, “Well I just haven’t met anyone who has this of that quality.” – But you have.  All the time actually.

As I’ve said before, at it’s base level, attraction is not a choice.  The good news is that we are attracted at some level to all sorts of people.  But we aren’t attracted to that list.  The list should help us decide what to do with the attraction.

This has huge ramifications both personally and corporately in the church.

We spend a lot of time telling people that they need to be the things on the list, which is fine.  But we spend about zero time talking about how to deal with attraction – both how to be more attractive, and how to handle it when we are attracted.  Continually beating us over the head with what should be on our list (i.e. “don’t settle”) isn’t enough.  Neither is telling people that if they are those things that they will be attractive – because that’s false.

We also end up hurting people.  We say things like, “well you have all these great qualities, someone will want that” or “you’d make a great husband (wife)”.  While a nice compliment it doesn’t help anyone get married.  It also can cause more pain when we interact with the opposite sex.

In one group I was teaching at we asked people why they thought they were still single. One woman said, “It’s tough to meet a Christian.”  I smiled and kind of cringed because really this woman just disrespected every guy in the room.  She didn’t mean to, and she doesn’t have to.  What she should have maybe said is “I haven’t met a man who I’m that attracted to that is a Christian.”

Now this of course raises many questions including can you marry someone you aren’t attracted to?  That’s a post I’ll write soon but we need to begin to get ahold of this idea. We need to own our attraction issues which can be complicated.  We need to understand that just because we would make a great spouse doesn’t get us married.  They are different skill sets – not opposing skill sets, but different.

There are all sorts of people that can get married that would make horrible spouses and vice a versa.

Some things to think about:

What is really on your list?  How much does your list matter vs. attraction?  How honest are you with yourself and others about all of this?  What is your attraction measurement?

Don’t Guard Her Heart

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So you may have seen the video “Shoot Christians Say.”  There’s a lot of funny stuff here that speaks to our evangelical culture.  But the part I want to talk about comes at about the 1:41 mark.

There is the idea that somehow it is the guys job in a relationship, heck even in general, to guard the girl’s (or perhaps every girl’s) heart.  I think this can be a huge trap for the Christian single guy.

There are a lot of big flaws with this idea.

To begin with, that phrase is used in Proverbs 4:23 –

“Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.”

This is not talking about romance in any way.  It’s not even talking about being careful not to love a person too quickly.  It’s saying keep your heart focussed on God and centered the right way.  Because if you don’t, then everything else will get clouded.  (Quick aside – in the bible, heart is not your emotions.  It is your very central being.  The heart speaks, thinks, remembers etc all throughout the bible – it is not separated out as your emotional self.  It is your core self).

Obviously you can set your heart on many things, including a romantic relationship.  But it’s not limited in anyway to that.  And neither is this verse – especially when read in context.

Secondly, it doesn’t say to guard anyone else’s heart.  Do you know why?  Because you can’t.  I can’t keep someone else’s heart focussed on God.

This is one of the major problems with the whole “Kissed Dating Goodbye” and “Choosing God’s Best” type books of the 90’s.  There was this idea that if you didn’t make out or whatever that no one’s “heart” would get hurt.  This is of course sold in the context of women’s sexuality being linked to feelings while guys are “just” physical so you could somehow help the girl not get hurt by not making out with her.  The problem is that I can have my heart set on a person or relationship without even dating them, let alone without making out with them.

I know this because I’ve had times in my life, especially from about age 16-25, where I had my heart set on someone who didn’t even want to date me at all.  Was it their job to guard my heart?

So for starters you can’t guard someone else’s heart for them.  But that is just the beginning of the problem.

This idea is often rooted in the idea that guys are bad and girls are innocent.  I’ve pretty much never heard a message that a girl should guard a guys heart. (Maybe a couple of times).  The idea being as men we are a sex craved animal who will use women.  So we need to “man up” and protect the girl from us.  Yikes!

This affects Christian guys in a lot of subtle ways that aren’t good.  First it can keep them from asking out anybody or certainly from taking things forward if they aren’t sure they want to.

I can remember times where because I wasn’t 100% sure I was into it I backed away in a hurry because I didn’t want to “hurt” that person.  Now if you know for sure that you are not into it then yes, you should back away.  But a lot of relationships have a some time of not being so sure.  If I’m constantly worried about guarding everyone’s heart, I can end up freezing myself.

Secondly, this is one of the ways that we’ve helped Christian guys become less attractive because they end up coming off as “nice” guys.  We end up “declaring our intentions” or “having the talk” at times when we don’t have to.  We end up being so accommodating that we become annoying.  As I’ve said before, no girl wants a guy that can’t stand up to her.  And no girl wants to know your “intentions” before you’ve had a first date.

Essentially while trying to guard everyone’s heart but our own, we end up either overplaying our hand or not playing our hand at all.

Am I saying to crush girls hearts? No! No! No!  I’m not saying toy with people, make out with whoever, whenever, treat people like an expendable product or lead people on just for the heck of it or because you don’t have the courage to end a relationship.  You shouldn’t do any of those things!  But that’s not guarding her heart – that’s just called caring about another person.  That’s a good idea.  That’s right.  Don’t use people.  Seriously.

But don’t pursue a woman with an attitude of protecting her from yourself.  It’s her job to guard her own heart (meaning staying focussed on God and getting her core validation from Him) and it’s your job to do the same with yours.  You can be protective of her physically and emotionally as best you can, but you can’t guard her heart in the biblical sense or guarantee that she or you won’t get hurt.

What has the term guard her heart meant to you?  Has it been a good or bad thing?  Has it held you back and from what?

The Danger Of Church Dating

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One of the things that people used to ask me all the time about my “search” for a wife was something to the effect of, “Have you tried at Church?  I mean there are all sorts of women there.  Are you asking them out?”

What makes this an even better question in my case is that throughout my 30’s I attended a church of the hot chick.  In other words I attended a church in which there were lots of single people, many of whom were attractive.  In fact many people go there partly because of this.  I mean what better place to meet someone than a 2000 person church where singles are actually welcomed right?  Well sort of.

Here’s the thing about “Christian” dating – it’s never simple.  It’s a huge disadvantage really.

For starters, it can be hard to figure out the approach etiquette at church.  I mean the “talk to them in the lobby” thing has some value, but our lobby was small and the window to approach was short. But that is nothing compared to the mind games you have to play.

In the church as a guy, if you never approach anyone then you are obviously passive, and not a real Christian leader.  But if you approach too many people you are “that guy”.  And here’s the best part about that.  There are two “that guys”.  The one who approaches and gets shot down by everyone and the one who is successful in the approach but then decides he doesn’t want a second date (or third, or fourth, or doesn’t want to marry that girl).  In a hurry you become either the creeper or the player.  Welcome to dating in the church as a guy.

To top it off, you get to be called out by the pastor.  “Men just need to man up and initiate.” As someone in a class I was teaching a couple of weeks ago said, “You need to ‘man up’. But only once.” Truth!

Here’s the reality.  In our church culture, the church can be one of the least safe places to ask someone out.

Think about it.  If I go to a bar, for example, I approach a girl, she says no, I move on. There’s a good chance she won’t be there in a week.  Or I just go to a different bar if I want.  Grocery store, book store, mall, your waitress, and certainly online – all way safer. Less blowback and less expectations.  Heck the only thing more dangerous than church might be work. . . maybe.

There a lot of reasons for this.  I won’t even try to cover them all, but here are a few (I’ll have more to say about some of these later).

It starts with the general idea in evangelical culture that women are basically innocent and men are basically lustful or immature.  You don’t hear many sermons about it being time to woman up.  There is not space in this post to get into this but think about it for any length of time and you see it.

In church the expectation is marriage.  This isn’t all bad.  It should be the ultimate goal of dating.  But it shouldn’t be the goal of the first date.  If a guy approaches a woman, she shouldn’t have to answer if she wants to marry him, just if she wants coffee.  At the same time, for the love of all things, a few dates does not a marriage make.  No other context creates this type of pressure.

If it goes bad, you still have to go to church there.  In other words, I like my church.  If I ask someone out, she’ll still be there next week.  What if she says no?  What if she says yes? What if we kiss and then break up?  What if I then ask someone else out?  No matter what happens this is both people’s place of worship.

It only takes one scorn woman to mess with your reputation.  Choose wisely.

I know this much – I always hesitated to ask out anyone from church.

This needs to change.  Here are a few quick thoughts on how.

First off we need to get in our heads that both men and women are good and bad. Men need more than the three categories of creeper, player, and perfect.

Second men and women need to show each other this grace thing we all talk so much about.  I remember once I asked out this woman from church.  She said yes, and then changed her mind to no.  I was frustrated and we had a bit of a rough exchange. I then realized she was into someone else.  I walked up to her the next Sunday and simply said, “Hey, are we good?”  She said yes and you know what we were.  Revolutionary I know.

Third and maybe most important.  If the leaders of a church are going to tell men that they need to “man up”, then they better dang well have their back when they do.  The male leadership of the church need to be able to stand up to women, not just stand up for them.  I’ve been blessed to have seen this done well at my church several times.  It’s huge. There’s a time to call out both the creeper and the player, but there is also time to stand up for the guy and tell the woman to let it go.

What about you?  What would make the church a safer place to pursue women?  What is your church’s culture of dating?  Does it make you want to pursue or scare you off? How would you change it?

Singleroots Honor

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Just a quick post to say thanks to the sight Singleroots.  I wrote a guest blog about suffering as a single that they chose as one of the top ten guest posts of the last year.

You can see all their top ten lists for the year right here

They have a great site and I appreciate the chance to write for them here and there.  Thanks Singleroots

 

Fulfilling Sexual Desire Keeps You Single

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I’ve talked here many times about the fact that less and less people are getting married. Right now 50% of adults in the U.S. are unmarried.  Only 20% of those 18-29 have ever been married.  People are waiting longer or just not getting married at all.

There are a whole host of reasons for this and I’ve talked about many of them here before. But one of the biggest reasons is that we as a culture (even in the Church) have separated sex from marriage.  And to go a step further we’ve actually made sex only about physical pleasure.  And because of it, we are really, really jacked up.

Now I get, and have pointed out before, that this is not “new” to the world.  I mean there have always been jacked up cultures and there has certainly always been sexual sin.  But never has the overall impact on marriage been felt the way it is now.

What we have now is a combination of a lot more ways to meet the physical desire for sex, and a culture that is ok with all of it.  It’s killing us – individually and as a culture.

Sex was not created to be just physical.  It is a part of it, but not all of it.  From the very beginning it was to bring two people together to become one flesh but only those two people.  It is an important part of the marriage covenant.  When we take it out of that context or when we make it just about physical desire, we are devaluing everything about it – both within and outside of marriages.

Here’s the reality.  One of the surest ways to stay single is to have your sexual desire met some other way.

This plays out all sorts of ways.  First off, all sorts of people are obviously having sex. Some of it is purely for the physical desire.  Some of it is in “relationships”.  But either way people are not having less sex today than before.  They just aren’t doing it within marriage. People sleep together, live together, and even have children together, without marriage.

But now there are even more ways to meet my physical desire.  I can just go on the internet.  When I was a kid, you at least had to risk hiding the magazine with pictures. Now you can watch it, heck even interact with it, and then just hit delete.  If it’s just physical, why work for it.

No matter how you look at it, it is easier than ever to get your physical desire met.  And everyone is telling us this is what it’s about.  All the media, our leaders, even some of our parents.  And at some level even the Church.  We spend so much time focussing on what not to do.  The basic message is don’t look, don’t touch, sex is bad until you are married then it’s good.  Bury your desire and then flip the switch when you get married.  But the problem is not only is the act of sex bigger than just physical, so are the questions that surround it.

Sure we are told that married sex is better – but what does better mean?  We automatically assume that means more physically pleasurable.  But sexuality isn’t just about that.  It’s about being bonded to the other person.

If we make sex only about pleasure and sexual desire, then I don’t have to get married to have it.  And, even if I get married, I could still be stuck in it only being about the physical. That can lead to less intimacy and ultimately less sex.  If you don’t need it that day, you don’t do it.  Or maybe the computer is still easier.

If we make sex about only the physical then why does it matter how you meet the need. You can meet it at the bar, at the computer, or even with the same sex.

I don’t say all of this to turn it into a lecture on how sex outside of marriage is sinful.  That’s a no brainer.  I say it because I think we as believers have to go way beyond that.  We have to understand that it isn’t just some sort of physical discipline.  There is way more on the line than that.

My pastor has often said that we need the single people in our church to have less sex and our married people to have more. I agree with that, but we need more than that.  We need sex to not be just sex – just physical pleasure.  “Not having sex” is a start, but it isn’t enough.  We need to understand that meeting the physical desire for sex outside of marriage hurts both our chances of getting married and experiencing sex the right way within our marriages.  We need a whole lot of repentance and relearning.

Do you view sex as primarily physical?  What is your view of sex based on?  Do you have your physical desire for sex met already?  What do you do with that desire?

You Are Not Your Marital Status

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When I was a young kid what I wanted more than anything was to be good at sports.  I practiced a ton.  I played imaginary games in my driveway and back yard.  I dreamed of playing for my favorite pro and college teams.

When I got to my freshmen year of high school I was still dreaming.  I wanted to be a star.  I wanted people to notice me and I wanted to win.  I remember seeing the seniors in their letter jackets with patches for championships and individual awards.  Oh yeah I wanted that.  And I got one.

I lettered in basketball my sophomore year and got my jacket.  My junior and senior year I racked up awards to sew on and newspaper articles to put in the scrap book.  And I had a couple of championship patches as well.  I wore that jacket with pride.  People knew who I was, not just in my town but the ones around it.  I had “arrived”.

Here’s what funny.  I graduated in May, went to play football in college.  Do you know how many times after May 31 1991 that I wore that jacket?  Exactly zero.  Because now I had new things to drive me.

Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be good, working hard and accomplishing something.  And really so what if I then made new goals.  But here was the bad part.  The whole way, I thought if I could just get good enough, my life would be full.  I thought it would mean a lot more than it did.

The truth is that my identity was wrapped up in it.  It wasn’t just what I was doing, or the context I was in.  It was who I was. And that is why the empty feeling when it’s over.  It’s a feeling most of us know.  The big project is over, you hit your bonus and get to buy that item you wanted, you meet a ministry goal, or heck for that matter, your favorite teams wins a championship.  You enjoy it and then it’s gone.  If your identity is in it, there’s emptiness.

This is a huge trap when it comes to singleness and marriage.

First of all, if you have marriage as an idol you’re in trouble.  In other words if you think that if I can just get married then life will be ok, that’s going to make both singleness and marriage (if you get married) rougher than it has to be.  Marriage is not the answer to “what is missing”.  That’s setting yourself up to fall.  I’ve known people who have gotten married (accomplished their dream) and then thought, “now what?”.  That is a rough place to be. Marriage is a beginning, not an arrival and that’s understating it.

But as a single, there is another trap.  That is that your identity get’s wrapped up in the whole thing.  It is so easy to make one of two big mistakes.  The first is to be dominated by the desire to be married.  The second is to shun the whole process.  Both of these are desperate and often angry, places to be.

Usually what I would do was swing wildly back and forth between the two.  In my early 20’s I was constantly desiring a spouse.  I wanted to find the “one“.  Or I thought I had met her and of course then had to chase her down.  But then in my late 20’s after crashing and burning over and over, I just decided to shun the whole thing.  F it.  I would bury myself into work.  Of course I still wanted marriage, but I wasn’t going to actively pursue it.  God would just “bring me someone” anyway right?!

I spent a lot of time mad.  Mad at God.  Mad at other guys who didn’t deserve what I should have because I was a “good” guy.  Mad at women who weren’t attracted to me (because they should all be attracted to me right?).

But in the middle of all of it, it became my identity.  It was constantly a part of my prayers, conversations with friends, heck conversations with anyone.  What can we pray for?  A wife.

Whether I was constantly pursing or saying F it, it was still what I was about.  And that is the trap we have to avoid.

The reality is that we need our identity in Christ.  We need to know that married or single that comes first.  As I’ve pointed out before, you can get married next week, and two weeks later your spouse could die in a car wreck.  Are you a single person?  A married person?  Know what I’m saying? Not to mention as long as you need someone, you can’t love them well.  They have too much power.

We are not what we do.  We are not our marital status.  Our identity should not be defined by what we do, or the context (marital or otherwise) we live in.  Our identity should play out in what we do, and in the context we are in.

What is your identity in?  Are you dominated by the search?  Are you hiding by doing nothing?