Compared to What? | Doug Wilson

it is not just bill versus john there's also bill versus 10 years from now having yet another glass of wine on your deck in the evening by yourself [Music] dear darla now there are some strategic and tactical implications of what i wrote in my last few letters it is time for us to game some of this out let's get practical or a bit more practical in your thinking at any rate you're in your mid-20s now and so you may have noticed that requests to go out with guys are starting to taper off if you haven't noticed that yet and if you don't get married the next few years you can rest assured that at some point you will notice it 42 year old women don't get the same attention that 22 year old women do and complaining about things like this is a fool's game it is like complaining about gravity wise women work with the way the world actually is and not the way they would have liked it to have been now i do need to emphasize something the front end of all this i have no desire whatever to be involved in pressuring any girl to say yes to some guy she doesn't want to say yes to nobody needs authority figures parents pastors or even uncles to be leaning heavily on young ladies under their charge just because the authority figure went to college back in the day with murgatroyd b schwartz's parents and that is why they would like her to give him a second look the world has enough sorrow in it however there are different kinds of sorrow in the world there is the sorrow of unhappy marriages whether caused by sin or by a marital mismatching of gifts and personalities on the one hand but on the other there's also the sorrow of loneliness i have written elsewhere on the fact that undesired singleness is an affliction not a gift and so that must be taken into account as well that possible sorrow needs to be one of the variables in the calculation and so this is how to frame the question to yourself now during the era when the guys are still clustering around it is natural and right for you to want to sort through them there's no way to say no to some and yes to another without comparisons you don't want to inject snark into your comparisons because no guy ought ever to be snarked at just because he paid you a compliment but at the same time if you say no to bill and yes to john the unavoidable conclusion is that you thought that john was better for you he offered more of what you were looking for and bill did not don't chafe at this it is how god decided to govern the world bill shouldn't chafe at it either but here's something that you need to seriously consider it needs to be one of your thought experiments you preferred john to bill and you had every right to do so but now change the comparison what about bill over against nobody if you are 40 and unmarried is that situation to be preferred to being the wife of bill it is not just bill versus john there's also bill versus 10 years from now having yet another glass of wine on your deck in the evening by yourself i do not bring this up in order to worry you terrify you or panic you this loneliness prospect is one that some young women think about too much while others don't consider it much at all those who think about it too much will face the temptation to give into what we call quote unquote settling this conjures up visions of charlotte settling for mr collins and you imagine yourself in that position which is why you then wake up from your nightmare gasping for air and in a bad flop sweat yeah so don't settle don't do that because settling is bad but you have known me for long enough that perhaps you might anticipate my next question by what standard if elizabeth had asked herself 10 years after the mr darcy thing didn't work out if she had done right by spurning mr collins her answer would be just as decisive then as it was the day she first shut him down she wouldn't have second thoughts about it you should prefer loneliness to some matches but there are many young women who say no to a real live bill because they expect that there will be a john who shows up any week now however at the moment john is still imaginary and for many girls that's the way he stays so what is it that keeps this ethereal john who stands her up for every day in the running this is where i might get to meddling a little bit there's a modern doctrine going about that tells young people that they should hold out for quote-unquote the one and that they will know quote unquote the one when he arrives and they will know it quote unquote in their heart or perhaps if they were catechized by share by means of the shoop shoop song it needs to be found quote unquote in his kiss the road to many a broken heart was paved with wisdom like that right there but this is the dogmatic foundation of the entire chick flick industry and a lot of damage has been done by it quote unquote the one looks into your eyes and discovers the depths of the real you quote unquote the one is your best friend forever quote unquote the one is your true soul mate and appointed as such by your guardian angel or perhaps by gabriel quote unquote the one takes you as you are without ever requiring you to take him as he is and therein lies a tale a whole lot of this is just pornography for the emotions and while i'm sorry to be rude take a moment to compare how similar it is to sexual porn actual women complain that guys are idiots to be attracted to the women of porn who are just airbrushed cartoons they say with a justified grievance that quote unquote real women aren't like that how could anybody be lured away from real relationship by some two-dimensional twinkie well the answer is simple it happens the same way that women are lured away from real relationship with an actual guy by the contrivances of some smooth-talking scriptwriter quote when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible close quote quote well it was a million tiny things that when you added them all up they meant we were supposed to be together and i knew it i knew it the very first time i touched her it was like coming home only to no home i'd ever known i was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and i knew it was like magic close quote quote when i saw your eyes that first time i realized that looking into them was the only possible way i could ever see into my own out of those three quotes i made up only one of them if you ever meet a guy who talks like that please take the advice of your uncle and run at that part of the movie all the guys mutter sheesh to themselves but do not say anything they do not say anything because that is currently an approved lie they mutter this the same way that the women say sheesh at the nudity in the movies what this double standard means is that men must not be lied to in the same way that women can be lied to but the real standard is that no one ought to be lied to the problem is that what women often mean by real relationship is just as artificial and contrived as the porn is imagine conversations that are dark roast coffee for the morning with a sensitive swirl of gentle cream on the black surface or settle down like dying embers at the end of a pleasant evening's fire are conversations that do not reflect how the mundane flow of regular life usually goes those conversations more frequently have to do with mashed potatoes how work went today and who's picking up the kids this is not meant to slam an appropriate poetic element in our lives or a romantic sexual element either that kind of thing really is part of real life the thing i'm targeting is unrealistic expectations and when someone has unrealistic expectations they generally get applied to all of life more specifically on the point we are discussing they are applied to prospective suitors and the young woman wonders if he could live up to the levels that she has been imagining for herself and if he is a typical young man of godly character the answer to that is almost certainly not but what that should reveal is the inadequacy of artificially constructed expectations when i ask by what standard the implied answer to my rhetorical question is always to be scripture a young woman should always be asking if a particular young man has the capacity of character to be a biblical husband to her those last two words to her do bring in a subjective element can his pickup truck pull her trailer if she respects him and if others in her life also respect him and she knows the value of their respect that is something to take seriously provided they are biblical standards it is essential to have high standards don't settle for a little dishonest or a little lazy or a little bit of coasting in his reading of the word don't settle but notice that these are all character issues and scriptural standards whether he is dreamy or as outgoing as your brother or prepared to accept you as you are are not in the same category and since i mentioned it again let me say just one thing about this quote unquote accepting you as you are virtue why is it a virtue for men to accept their women as they are but not for women to do the same if it were truly a good thing as all women appear to appreciate then why don't more women accept men as they are because that would be a bad idea that's why bad idea both directions your uncle douglas thanks for watching i wanted to make sure to let you know that season 4 of man ranting this year for the next few weeks we'll be posting clips on the canon press youtube channel but the full interviews are only available on canon plus check it out at mycanonplus.com man rampant and if you haven't joined up yet you can get your first month for just 99 cents by using promo code mr99

Channel: Blog & Mablog

Views: 19,513

Keywords: doug wilson, douglas wilson, blog, blog and mablog, mablog, dougwils, canon press, canon, moscow, moscow idaho, pastor doug wilson, relationship advice, relationships, man, woman, boy, girl, Christian, dating, dating advice, biblical, Bible, tips, compare, comparing, compared, comparison, pastor

Id: _uFT2_s-sPI

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022