Men’s Christian Dating Blog

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A couple of weeks back, John S. and myself were discussing, if you had to pick one, what would be a woman’s “key” insecurity. Recently, having picked up John Eldredge’s newest book, I was delighted to see that his answer and our answer was the same: fear of being abandoned.

This one insecurity explains a whole host of feminine behaviors in a way that makes them clear. Excessive focus on fashion and personal appearance? Trying to be attractive enough that he won’t leave you. Complete inattention to personal appearance and weight? If he can love you in spite of that, no way is he going to leave. Cattiness towards other attractive women? She might steal what I want to keep.

Also, clearly, if your presence relieves her of this insecurity, guess what? She is going to crave having you around. You are providing a relief from a primal fear. Can you see how this would be addicting?

Now there are, as with everything else, healthy and unhealthy ways to do this, and if you abuse this knowledge, it’s on you.  But there is one behavior you need to exhibit.

Show a capacity for faithfulness! Don’t stare at other women when you are with her. Do what you say you are going to do. These behaviors will help. Of course that is not all there is to it. The next big thing has to do with your major insecurity…which will be dealt with next time.

Michael Dyer

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#1  There is a temptation to view “getting better with women” as a skill, in the same sense that kicking a football is a skill.

Women are human beings. They have desires and dreams just like the rest of us. Using a woman that you have no real interest in as a test subject for getting better at this “skill” is wrong. In the old days they used to call it leading someone on. Don’t make romantic advances towards a woman in a way that does not reflect what you truly intend. She does not exist for you to use her as a stepping stone towards someone you really do want. This is not to say that you shouldn’t talk to a woman unless you are interested in her. You should try to talk to as many people as possible, but if it is not right, then don’t take it further. 

#2 Follow your conscience. If anything I recommend on this page contradicts a moral conviction of yours, don’t think it is “necessary”, and don’t follow it. You may want to research your conviction to see if it is true, but nothing is worth a bad conscience.

#3 Use your head. No advice relieves you of your duty to think. Now there is thinking and there is thinking. “Take 3 Steps” doesn’t mean walking towards a bridesmaid during a wedding ceremony! An exaggeration, but I think you get the point.

#4 Don’t be afraid to step away and come back later. Getting immersed in learning about human relationships is easy to do. It’s fascinating and it is fun. But don’t just keep pressing on, a good rule of thumb is that if you’re getting more and more tired while researching, it’s time to stop for a little while.

#5 Take all of this as serious as necessary, and no more so! You can’t stop mistakes from happening, and you shouldn’t let fear of mistakes keep you from doing anything. Try to keep perspective, as CS Lewis talks about in the Screwtape Letters, we are all subject to the “law of undulation”, energy, interest, and ability are not static or linear.

Keep your head straight,

Michael Dyer

CS Lewis, in the Screwtape Letters, remarks that cowardice is the only sin that is purely painful, painful to contemplate, painful to choose, painful to remember. He also remarked, elsewhere, that courage is a necessary condition for any virtue.

The primary failing in our relationships with women comes from this failing I think. When women say they want a man with “confidence”, aren’t courage and confidence related? How many times do we shut ourselves down before we even get started? If you’re not doing anything wrong by talking to a girl and asking her out, then what is holding you back?

Now, this is not an excuse to stop using your head. But, I think, on a heart level, we all know the difference between cowardice and prudence. If you don’t walk over and talk to her because she’s with her boyfriend, that’s just prudence, no reason to feel guilty. But, we all have had those moments where we knew it was the right thing, it was something we wanted to do and nothing was wrong with it, that we failed to step up to the plate.

Why do men do this? It’s not just pure cravenness. What if she says no? Has a boyfriend? Is insulting? (that last one, a real fear for many guys, pretty much never happens in real life, by the way) The answer to these fears is common sense. If she says no? You don’t know why she is saying that, no reason to judge her or yourself harshly. Has a boyfriend? Is it strange that another man wanted what you want? Is insulting? She can’t possibly know you well enough to be justified in insulting you, if you meet one of these statistical outliers, move on, she’s probably not what you really want anyway.

God wants you to freely choose the right thing. What causes conflict is double-mindedness. You know you need to do something, yet you also believe that doing that thing is too painful. The truth of the matter is that the pain of not doing is always far worse. Regret lasts longer and cuts deeper than rejection. You also know that cowardice hasn’t worked out for you so far.

This may feel like a pep talk, but the principle goes deeper. Every time you deliberately back down when you know you should step forward you move farther and farther away from the thing you want most. A useful exercise is, “Take 3 Steps”. Once you’ve taken three steps towards a girl, you know you can’t back down without looking stupid. Once you’ve committed, the tendency is for a lot of the anxiety to go away as well (part of the reason for this is spiritual, but we’ll have to go more into that later).

3 steps, don’t focus on anything else, just take 3 steps forward,

Michael D.

Now that you have some tools for interpreting what’s going on in your mind, and for focusing your efforts on your choices, the next step is perhaps best illustrated by a story John S. said that he heard from one of the ministers.

Becoming a Christian is like being a beggar, you’re hungry and a man invites you into a restaurant where you not only get fed, but he tells you that he is going to make you a full partner in the business. You’re not only getting the food you need, but who you are has changed. You’re no longer a homeless and hungry beggar, but you are now a resteraunteur! However, shifting from the beggar mindset to the business owner mindset is a pretty big shift, isn’t it?

The fact of the matter is, a lot of who you think you are is not true, not anymore. You’re playing your life out by a script written for a role that you are no longer suited to play. This script has cast you in the part of a man who is insecure, who thinks that money, looks, or “magic” are the dominating parts of his romantic life, who knows on some level that he should become a better man but doesn’t know how.

As Christians, we know that all sin begins in the heart, in the attitudes and beliefs we form about something before we actually “act”. Perhaps the single biggest enemy you have is passivity in the face of a self concept that no longer applies. We’re faced with challenges and temptations, and our response is, far too frequently, indifference of one kind or another. We have accepted as true impressions of ourselves that are false.

Throughout the Bible, our ability to form a right opinion of something and to take a right action seems to me to be presupposed. It is assumed that you know can see the difference between good and evil. It is assumed that you are capable of acting well or acting poorly. In the Bible, you also seem to be judged by the level of knowledge that you have more than the content of any one action or attitude.

So you shouldn’t feel too guilty, as a general rule, for what was in your past, when you didn’t know any better. You are no longer a beggar. You are learning about how to be a better man, which, if you weren’t before, definitively means you are a better man now. You need to accept that as true and act like it. Fix an idea in your mind of the man you want to become, if you want to become this sort of man, it means that being that kind of man is already a part of you in some way. To become that better future self in practice, ask how this better self , what attitudes would he have? What actions would he take? What would he avoid? What would he think is false?

Remember part II, you can’t avoid all of the impressions and bad attidues from popping into your head, but they don’t become a part of you until you accept them. If you avoid what damages you, and move towards what strengthens you, the better you, the part of you that is strong, good, and happy becomes stronger, better, and happier. The part of you which is the worse part becomes weaker and less dominant.

Michael D.

If  you want to change your behavior, you’ve got to know how, and this idea was one of the biggest ones in western Christendom for centuries for a reason, from Augustine to Aquinas to Chemnitz to the modern day. And yes, it applies to your relationships with women in some pretty neat ways.

A little explanation of the terms, mortal and venial sin splits sin into two categories with useful applications for each. It’s not just “big” sin and “little” sin, but an excellent key for distinguishing what you personally are responsible for. A mortal sin is something that you choose to do that is wrong, with three conditions, free will, sufficient reflection, and deliberate consent. It’s wrong and you know it’s wrong while you’re doing it, you know exactly what you’re doing. Venial sin is anything wrong that we do that has a defect in one of the three conditions, and is more in the nature of a mistake than deliberately choosing wrong.

Mortal sin is far more serious, because you have have far more control, and therefore responsibility. This is a freeing concept however because it helps make clear what you already know on some level, a lot of the mistakes and stupid stuff we do doesn’t justify the level of fear or guilt that we associate with it, we are not fully, only partially, responsible. So, every time you make a mistake, as long as you didn’t deliberately choose something you knew was wrong, there’s no reason to view the mistake as a terrible set back.

In many ways being a better man is bound up more in not screwing yourself up than in “doing” certain things (although that is necessary). If it’s not intentional, there’s no real reason to be afraid of screwing up. When dealing with ourselves and the opposite sex it’s normal to have little flashes of cowardice or neediness or any number of harmful things. As long as you’re not deliberately and consciously indulging them, it’s just part of the growth process.

If you avoid the deliberate decision to be cowardly or needy (more commonly this takes the form of focusing on these ideas), your true, and best self, can start to come out. You see, “sin” is, among other things, anything you do that is harmful to you and your relationship to God. Cowardice is certainly harmful, and is, as CS Lewis says, the only sin that is entirely painful, painful to contemplate, painful to experience, and painful to remember. As long as you don’t choose it, bravery is, in some ways, your natural state. I think you’ll also find that when you stop deliberately choosing something that you know, at least confusedly, shows cowardice, the “little flashes” will have less frequency and intensity. You still can’t control them, but you can influence them.

Michael D.

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We live, like the ancient Chinese curse, in interesting times.

I ran into my pastor at Starbucks recently (he’s now leaving us to teach at a nationally recognized seminary). Perhaps the first time I’ve ever really had a real conversation with him. I told him about how most of what I needed to know for my own spiritual growth, I got out of books, not anything I learned in any church I’d ever been to. Perhaps a little bold, in retrospect, since that included his church, but he said something interesting.

That that was his experience as well.

What kind of state is the church in where a parishioner and a pastor both admit that they almost never learned what they really needed to know in church? About spiritual growth? Kind of the church’s mission isn’t it?

I know the old saying, attributed to St. Francis when I heard it that, “You should preach the gospel at all times, and, if necessary, use words”. Problem is words are necessary. Observing something without knowing what’s behind it is the death of knowledge, it keeps it from being passed on. When it comes to being a better man we have precious little to observe and almost no explanation. This is a state of affairs that cannot continue.

This blog is about dating, and everything applies to that as well. But dating is not a sector of your life cut out from everything else. Done right, you’re displaying who you truly are to a girl, your best self, someone she can trust, someone she has every reason to be attracted to. But, if you don’t know how to be better than you are now, you won’t have the tools to be better.

Because being the way you are now hasn’t worked out very well has it?

Michael D.

CS Lewis once said that that being good is less about doing good things and more about being the sort of person who does good things.

Attracting women purely through using tips and tricks is kind of unsatisfying ultimately. Went through my own stage with this, and you ultimately wind up with the same sort of problem that the rich and famous have in their relationships, “Does she like me or does she like what I have (fame, money, good looks, etc.)?”  I had to ask myself whether or not a girl liked me because I knew the right buttons to push, or because she like me.

One of the most exciting discoveries in my own life, is when I discovered that I could be a better man, and that being a better man makes better women automatically respond to you. It’s fantastic when a girl warms up to you and becomes open without any apparent effort on your part.

I’m not talking about some sort of false sunshine, feel good, “positive thinking” nonsense either. I’m talking about really becoming the man you desire to be, that you were designed to be. When you fit your own template of a strong and good man, good women are attracted to that, and the bad ones weed themselves out. You also become more aware of what’s really going on, paying less attention to what people say and more to how they’re responding and acting. The whole Male/Female dance becomes less of a complete mystery and more of a reality.

This is the introduction, so more, much more, later,

Michael D.

The Summa Theologica is downright amazing when describing how things really go down inside your head. According to Aquinas, when our “passions” (the part of the emotion you feel in your body) get going it hampers our ability to think and make decisions. Psychologists call this phenomenon an “amygdala hijack”.

When you’re in the presence of anything you fear, your body starts preparing itself for a life and death struggle, a place where you don’t need to think because you don’t have time, where your entire physiology is gearing itself towards getting you to safety. And come on, don’t we all feel fear talking to a beautiful woman? Nervousness, and, if you admit it to yourself, fear of what you’ll think of yourself if she does shut you down, the real cause of “fear of rejection”.

I mean it makes a kind of sense, who hasn’t been rejected by a woman, and immediately felt a tinge of despair, I mean, thoughts like “Well of course she doesn’t want me either”. Your mind sees things clearly even if you can’t verbalize it, if you think a course of action is leading you towards feelings of embarassment and despair, of course you’re going to get nervous, of course you’re going to want to get out of there, or not approach a girl at all.

So, what’s the solution? A bunch of cheesy self affirmations? “Positive Thinking” perhaps? You know the sort of thing that happens, people tell you that if you just think things will turn out right they will, but you also know the first time it doesn’t turn out right your belief in “Positive Thinking” falls apart, and you’re left feeling just as alone and desperate as before, probably worse.

But there is something you can do. There are some things you can learn. Aquinas discusses this very issue, of how a man can show bravery even when his “passions” are shutting him down.

What do you need to know and do to get this handled?

Well, more on that later,

Michael D.

If you’re like me, dating felt like magic. I would go for months without any success, and then some girl would seem to fall from the sky. Things would go well for a while, and then it would all, inexplicably go away. I tried hard, but it seemed like I couldn’t win, even if a girl was interested, she didn’t stay interested and just melted out of my life.

Honestly, it feels like magic doesn’t it? No one’s interested and then if they are, of course, that’s doomed to end by her choice.

But, the good news is, is that it isn’t magic, not totally. When you became interested in women, you started playing a game where you didn’t know the rules, so it follows that you would never win, in this case, the cards were really stacked against you. It’s nothing to feel bad about, it really isn’t your fault, it only stays your fault if you don’t learn the rules when you have the opportunity.

I call them “rules”, but they are really natural laws, ways I believe God has designed the world of men and women to work, of the same nature as other natural laws, like gravity. If a girl gets interested, but doesn’t stay interested, that’s actually a really good sign! If she got interested at all, that means you’ve got what it takes to get a girl interested doesn’t it? You’re not helpless, because something you have or did got her into you at least initially. And why wouldn’t she? You’re the descendant of countless men who have been able to attract women into their lives, just by virtue of being here, this is natural law. She saw something of that heritage in you and was drawn to it. She was drawn to who you really are.

Of course that begs the question, why didn’t she stay interested? Well, you know it’s not because of who you really are, that drew her to you. The only explanation is that you obscured your birthright of attractiveness, you did or didn’t do something, that was at fundamental odds with what she first saw, and so she left. This is the first rule, being congruent with you are, what God designed you to be, and designed all your forefathers to be. Of course this involves knowing how to really get self knowledge, to know who you truly are.

More on this later,

Michael D.

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