Every time I visit Grandma, she asks me whether I have a girlfriend. This’d be one thing if I visited her once a year, but lately it’s been every week—and she’s suffering from dementia, so it doesn’t matter how many times I tell her, “No I don’t.” She’ll forget and ask again.
“Why not?” she’ll follow up with. “Don’t you like girls?”
“No,” I answered last time, “I like women. Girls? Eww. What do you take me for?”
“Oh,” she’ll say dismissively, “you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I know what she means; she’s from that generation where any woman, regardless of age, is a “girl.” But she’s also from that generation where single men in their forties are weird. So she wants to make sure I’m attached, and on the way to producing her some great-grandchildren.
And one of these days, just for fun, I might invent a wife, kids, and grandkids. Make her an unexpected great-great-grandmother. But no, I don’t make up stories for Grandma. ’Cause dementia is a weird thing: You never know which stories might stick in her head. Next thing you know, she’ll be asking me every week when I’m gonna bring my grandchildren over. Rather than spinning a different yarn every visit, best I stick to the truth.
But the truth is I’m single, by choice. Not that I rule out ever being in a relationship, or ever marrying. It’s just I’m not looking.
I never actually have looked. That is, I don’t go to singles’ functions, I don’t ask friends to hook me up, I don’t sign up for dating services. I stay away from that whole scene.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, my churches stuck me in the singles’ groups. It’s most of the reason I avoid churches which have singles’ groups. Mine doesn’t have one. Every once in a while, one of the leaders floats the idea, and I try to pop it quickly.
The college-age singles group was fine. But once I progressed beyond college age, I was shunted into the post-collegiate singles group, and that was a dysfunctional meat market. I’d try to make friends, only to find out none of them wanted friends: They wanted partners. The men didn’t want men friends, lest we get in the way of them making women friends. And the women didn’t want men friends; they wanted boyfriends.
Thing is, I won’t seriously consider dating a woman unless we get along as friends first. I wanna make sure there’s something there beyond the superficial. I want her to be devout. I want her to have a brain. I want her to be self-controlled, both in behavior and emotions. I want her to not expect me to rescue her, nor take charge of her: Savior and Lord are both Christ’s job.
Which is probably the slowest system ever for finding a spouse. But I’m in no hurry. Grandma might be. Mom too. Me, I figure I’m content being single, and if I meet the right woman, I’ll be content being with her. Till then, no worries.
Last year I got into an argument with one of my single friends, who claimed it was just selfish of me to not get into a relationship: I was depriving some woman of a good man.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t consider myself that fabulous of a catch. But my friend believes in the Soulmate Hypothesis: For every person on the planet, there’s one person whom God wills for them. She believes a perfect man is out there somewhere, waiting for her to find him. And she was trying to convince me there’s a perfect woman out there, pining away because I’m not desperately searching for her.
It’s crap of course. But the Soulmate Hypothesis is really popular crap. I’ve met way too many women who believe in it. Men too. Some of it comes from the Calvinist idea of predestination and will of purpose: God has a secret will which pre-decides who goes where in eternity. And for those folks who believe in the Soulmate Hypothesis, God also decides who goes best with whom. If you miss that perfect person, you’re doomed to a life of second-best, ’cause you missed out on God’s best. It’s not far different from what they teach in beauty magazines and romantic comedies. It’s just as much a lie as everything else in ’em.
Two people meet and connect for any number of reasons. Sometimes good reasons, like compatibility. Sometimes awful reasons, like lust and intoxication. But once they decide to stay together, they make themselves soulmates. Some couples are so compatible, they needn’t try very hard. Others require tons of work. And others aren’t compatible whatsoever, and should’ve listened to all their friends and family members who tried to warn them away from one another. I knew a few of those couples in college: They were far too horny to see the warning signs, which were as obvious as air raid sirens to everyone but them. No surprise, they’re not married anymore. And till they stop thinking with their loins, they should never marry.
There’s no poor deprived soulmate of mine languishing away, wondering where I am while she passes from loser to loser like a burned-out doobie, soon to vanish by desperately clinging to one of those fools before he could get away, leaving me all alone in this cold cruel world. There are many women I’m compatible with. I’ve met a few. But the timing wasn’t right, or they were in other relationships.
Which brings up the evil side of the Soulmate Hypothesis: People use it to justify shattering their existing commitments because they found their “soulmate.” Doesn’t matter if they’re married. Doesn’t matter if it’s a longtime, compatible relationship. Doesn’t matter if children or families are involved. “You belong with me” means everything else will go in favor of the newfound soulmate.
But it does so matter. Compatibility is never a justification. If you were compatible with your sister—yes, that’s right, eww. But it’s also true for people in committed relationships: They’re just as much off limits.
My friend’s second objection was to my attitude I don’t have to be the one to initiate a relationship. She’s old-school: She thinks men should always make the first move. Because, she claims, men are supposed to be spiritual leaders. A man who doesn’t make the first move is no kind of leader.
I interpret the “spiritual leaders” idea far differently than she. Yeah, men are the spiritual leaders in their family. Not so much over their girlfriend. I had one girlfriend who ended things with me because I wasn’t “spiritually leading” her—I didn’t make sure she was reading her bible, or praying, or all that. We’d been on one date! I never figured our relationship had escalated to the worship-partner level; what kind of control-freak guys had she dated before me? (And she still lived with her dad: Wasn’t it still his duty to check up on her?)
In any event, Christians lead, in the kingdom of God, by being everyone’s servant. And a good servant doesn’t jump ahead of the person he’s serving. It’s not always prudent for me to make the first move: I gotta assess the situation. If she doesn’t tell me what she wants, how’m I gonna serve her adequately? If I have to guess or anticipate her moves, I’m gonna be a rotten servant. I can be really dense sometimes (and selfish other times), and I may be clever, but I’m not always right. She’s gonna be very frustrated with me if she expects me to be a mind-reader. Sometimes she’ll have to make the first move. And sometimes that includes asking me out.
Before I ask anyone out, I have what I call a “proto-relationship”: We’re acquaintances, I’m curious about her, and I’m trying to find out whether she’s dateable. Women who won’t ask out men, but are interested in them, have all sorts of proto-relationships. Sometimes many at once. They drop a lot of clues—some subtle, some really not—that he ought to initiate something.
You wanna drive me away? Be coy. Be vague. Imply things but never come right out and say anything. Decide you wanna gauge my interest by making me chase you. Then I won’t bother. I know from experience such girls will never stop playing that game, and I hate that game. Leslie don’t play that.
Whereas women who frankly tell me what they want: They not only get my interest, but my respect. It’s no guarantee I’ll date ’em (’cause, y'know, compatibility), but if I was on the fence before, I’m not afterward.
Bluntly, I believe the reason women embrace the whole “men oughta make the first move” idea has absolutely nothing to do with spiritual leadership. That’s just the convenient Christian excuse they’ve adopted. Truth is, they’re scared to make the first move. Because, as every man in the world well knows, it’s scary to make the first move: You might get rejected. So, many women cowardly hide behind the idea, “He needs to step up,” and will never ask out the men they really want. Oh, they’ll flirt like crazy, and sometimes that’ll actually work. But it doesn’t always. Hence some women are gonna die alone and bitter.
If you’re wondering whether this friend was arguing these points with me because she wanted me to date her… well, you’d be right. After I wrote something similar to this post a year ago (naming no names, but she recognized herself), she was so angry with me, she “broke up” with me. Which blindsided me a bit: We debated so often, I figured our incompatibility was a given. That’s why I wrote this:
No, I would not date this friend. She has many fine qualities, yet I’ll simply point this out: If you look at our very different views on dating, and how firmly she holds to her beliefs despite how ridiculous and unbiblical I find them, she’s going to chafe greatly if I ever married her and became her spiritual leader. There’s gotta be some intellectual compatibility, you see.
Well, she hadn’t ruled out the possibility. But after I put that on the internet, she did. You’d think my making fun of the Tea Party would have done it way before that paragraph, but I guess she figured we could work through our differences in politics. (No, we really couldn’t. Like I said, ridiculous and unbiblical.)
Yeah, I’m very opinionated. No, I’ve actually never found that to be a problem with the women I’ve dated. Either they had the same views, or they were willing to ignore my opinions ’cause I’m hot. (This isn’t conceit; it’s what an ex told me.) Despite how I sound when I’m ranting, not all my opinions are strongly held. Lots of them are tentative placeholders—stuff I believe till I can think of anything better. It’s why I keep saying, “I could be wrong.” I could be! The only ideology I cling to is Christianity. It’s why my politics are all over the map, ’cause contrary to what both conservatives and progressives claim, politically Christianity is likewise all over the map.
My strong opinions were never the reason my previous relationships ended. The real culprit? Either I concluded she was
Though I don’t look, various friends take it upon themselves to look on my behalf, and play matchmaker. Sometimes I let ’em. But that depends on how well they know me. I don’t just let anyone hook me up.
The last blind date I went on was a decade ago; I was in grad school at Bethany U., and the dorm was doing a
The one before that, was a decade before that. It was profoundly awful. My friend was dating this cokehead, and wanted to double-date with her gal pal, and set us up assuming since we were both Republicans we’d get along great. Well, I was a social conservative and fiscal liberal, and she was a libertarian. You do the math. Didn’t get along at all. I left the date early and walked home. What’s four miles, anyway?
The other times people set me up, it wasn’t on dates. They were simply introductions. “Meet my friend"—and I met their friend, and we talked a bit, and things went no further. Compatibility, you know.
No, I haven’t entirely sworn off blind dates. Because I’ve met friends that way—a guy will tell me, "Hey, there’s somebody I think you’d get along with,” and we do. It just hasn’t worked for dates. But it’s only been two blind dates. And really, the people who set me up weren’t really doing it for my benefit. More like, “I have a friend who needs a date; wanna come along?” and that was that. One just happened to be an awful human being, and the other barely legal. C'est la vie.