The dateable female…is not available at the spur of the moment for a date… Like a fine restaurant, she requires reservations.
– Hayley Morgan DiMarco, the dateable rules a guide to the sexes.
That rule is more a guideline for my dateable daughter. So when a young man called her Tuesday morning and asked if he could pick her up and take her to dinner that same night, she said yes. Partly because he wanted to go to a special food event in a nearby foodie town and it was only happening that night, and partly because he had a plan. “Wanna’ hang out?” is not a plan. “Can I pick you up at 5:45 and take you to a restaurant crawl?” is.
So he picked her up and they went. They were gone 5 hours. “Good,” I thought, “they must be hitting it off.”
When she returned home she said the evening was fine and that her date is a really nice guy.
“But,” she said the next morning, “here’s what’s wrong with him”:
He was telling me about all the books on Christian dating and marriage that he’s been reading, and he kept asking me what I think a Christian relationship looks like. So I took the opportunity to tell him that I think a Christian relationship looks like two people walking side by side, both following Jesus.
And he said, “Oh. Yeah.”
He seemed to get what I was saying. But then later he lamented that it is hard for the man to lead, especially when the woman wants things a certain way. “A woman always tries to lead,” he said, “she needs to submit to her husband.”
I told him that this is why I don’t think anyone is meant to lead in a Christian relationship. And then I pulled out my phone, cued up Rachel Held Evans’s post “10 Marriage Reality Checks (from 10 Years of Marriage)” and had him read item #6.
And he read it. And he and said, “Oh. Yeah.”
And then later, when the topic returned to Christian relationships once again, he said, “So the man leads…”
We have our work cut out for us.
Light & life 
I am only commenting to aver how brilliant you are, therefore according to your own rules my comment stays. Even though it has absolutely no relevance to your post…right?
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It doesn’t have to be relevant, all I care about is being called brilliant.
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HA! See ya’ made me laugh!
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Oy vey. So this guy is so insecure that he’s already trying to make rules about how a relationship should be before there’s any hint of a relationship. Right. He should be a barrel of fun to live with. Yikes.
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Yeah, she’s thinking she’s going to have to pass. He may just be misguided – by all those books he’s reading. The kind that keep telling Christian men to “man up” in a way that Jesus never intended.
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Maybe he (we all) should just spend more time in The Book and leave all the other books on the shelves for a time. Thing is, each writer has his own agenda. God’s agenda was to teach us to live godly in Christ Jesus, and sometimes I think we get so involved in reading the self-help stuff that we forget the most helpful Book.
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Amen Linda.
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I’m so glad my daughters are old married women….ummm…except….that makes me…gross old.
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I hear you Lew-Ellyn. Age has its advantages. Unfortunately its disadvantages glare at me every time I look in the mirror. So I avoid the mirror. The me I carry in my head is much younger and cuter.
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A brutally honest four-year-old student said to me, “Don’t you know when you’re old you are suppose to die?”
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Oh my goodness! hahahaha
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Told my family this on the way to dinner last night. They laughed and we all agreed that that four year old was lucky you didn’t send him full speed down the mountain.
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It was a little mean girl. I gave her such a scary “evil eye” that it made her eyes go round; she was silent the rest of the lesson.
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Hey I’m a man and I LEAD!
I lead in doing dishes, cooking delicious meals, taking out the garbage, allowing her to run our finances, that’s a “Lead” decision because she’s better with finances than I.
a.g.
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Bravo, a.g. What a blessed woman – all that delicious Puerto Rican food! Liked it all except the “allowing her” part.
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baked red potatoes, steamed veggies (green beans, peas and carrots), broiled, 2 days marinated chicken…?
not very Puerto rican today but delicious!
a.g.
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Sounds delicious. What do you use for a marinade?
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Kraft Asian toasted sesame dressing a bit of soy sauce and red pepper flakes sparingly. Wet roasted all in one with potatoes.
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I am a member of P.E.T.A. (people eating tasty animals:)
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My husband, a devout Christian man, is a professor at a small women’s college, and could pontificate (gotta love that word) at length on this topic. I’m including a link to a book that I found so freeing (where was this back in the 70’s???)about how God empowers women to lead, if you’re ever interested:
http://www.christianbook.com/fashioned-empowering-fulfill-their-divine-destiny/kris-vallotton
(no worries, I won’t ever ask whether or not you read it)
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I do love that word. My daughter read that book and said, “Mom, he’s saying all the things you said in your book.” She really liked it – all except the last chapter as I recall. I am going to read it after I publish mine (I wrote it in 2010 in Bible study format and piloted it with a few groups. Now I’m converting it to a book.) Happy that you read it and liked it.
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PLEASE let us know when you publish!! I would like a copy.
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I certainly will. And I’ll let you know when I’ve read Kris’s book so we can discuss.
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