Via Huffington Post, I stumbled on this Reddit thread asking Redditors, “why are you still married?” As I read through the comments, I can feel myself start to tear up. Because Trinity and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary, its a good question to ask myself. Why are you still married?
Category Archives: Relationships
What came first — the friend or Facebook?
One should be able to answer that question easily but its apparently getting harder to answer that question definitively. I stumbled onto this interesting article from Time magazine about whether Facebook is replacing face time with friends or not via Yahoo. Now, you would think, since we’re spending so much time on Facebook, we’re not really spending a whole lot of time with people in the flesh. But, seeing as how our lives are so hectic that we feel lost if we accidentally leave our phones at home, maybe Facebook is actually keeping us connected.
Enter Facebook, which provides a constant flow of information via short updates from everyone a user knows: a distant cousin is glad he skipped the cheeseburger chowder; a colleague has a new book is on sale; a close friend is engaged or newly single. Jenny and I, along with three of our childhood pals from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., learned that a dear old friend had ended her seven-year relationship through a Facebook status change. We expressed dismay, albeit through Facebook’s IM feature, that we had to learn such potent information in this impersonal way.
I’ve actually been wondering lately about Facebook posts and how you could actually tell a lot about what a person posts. But it tends to annoy me when people post their own work or blog posts on Facebook — until I started doing it myself. Is it annoying? Anyone want to weigh in on this?
How not to pick up a woman
Say two beautiful women are having dinner at, oh, let’s just pretend its the Yard House in Irvine. You want to strike up a conversation, but you don’t know how to go about it. Suddenly, genius strikes you — you’ll write a note! And send a glass of water over!
If those are the thoughts that strike you, I advise you to stop drinking alcohol at that point and instead start swigging that water you contemplated sending over.
FYI, this did not happen to me, but to my lovely coworker, Jenn. I’m not exactly sure if it was Jenn or her friend getting picked up on, though. So, be advised — if you ever do anything goofy to get a girl’s attention, rest assured — all her friends and coworkers will hear about it. And if you decide to send evidence, like the above-referenced note, it might just end up on someone’s blog.
Opposite end of the female spectrum
Earlier this week I commented on an article about women who are so modern and career-minded that they no longer want an alpha (dominant) male. Toward the end of the week, I am now a little stumped at this article I found in the LAT about Southern Baptist women going to seminary for degrees in Biblical homemaking.
In and of itself, through the beginning of the article, I don’t think there was anything I could disagree with per se — but there was just something odd, somewhat Stepford Wife about the whole story.
I agree that God values men and women equally and that women should submit (I like to call it cooperate, heheh) to her husband, with the understanding that the husband is putting his wife before himself. (Everyone likes to forget that caveat — just a couple of verses from where women are admonished to submit to their husbands, husbands are admonished to love his wife as he loves himself, in Ephesians 5:28.) But I guess what made me stop was this graf:
“If we love the Scripture, we must do it,” said Smith, who gave up her dreams of a career when her husband said it was time to have children. “We must fit into this role. It’s so much more important than our own personal happiness.”
We have to give up our own personal happiness? That doesn’t sound like a happy, long-lasting, joyful marriage. That sounds like a marriage that might eventually end in divorce.
It’s so weird, this spectrum of extremes. On one end its the uber-modern, career women who want someone who’s not going to “dominate” them. On this other end, there’s these ultra-conservative, “my place is only in the home” women who believe their only purpose is to submit to their husbands.
I am a modern woman, no doubt about that, but I cannot abide a wishy washy man who doesn’t know what he wants. My feeling is — if you don’t know what you want and you don’t know how to lead, what do I need you for? But even as I’m generally, socially conservative, I can’t see myself only being a housewife — even when I have kids. It’s also hard for me to accept that a woman’s only role is in the home — if that was the case, how could women be in Christian ministry? How could they write books to minister to others? How could they go through school to counsel people, in life and in ministry?
Trinity agrees with me, in that he doesn’t believe God ordained that women only work as housewives. At the same time, he added that these extremes may be in response to the general misalignment of gender and social roles. After all with women out there acting so dominant, there are men who believe they can score a sugar mama and just be a “house husband.” And that ain’t right.
Image lifted from OK Cupid’s Feminism Test¬†
Alpha male goes the way of the dodo?
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this here before, but Trinity and I first met when he was a freelance reporter coming in to my college student newspaper get a story edited by a news editor — me. He’s also younger than me. Does this intimidate him? Not so much — he mostly thinks I’m goofy.
But he also understands that I’m assertive, confident, successful and ambitious and this is not a problem for him. But according to this UK news article, women want a beta male. What the heck is a beta male, you ask? At first it confused me — I thought they meant test edition, kind of like how Flickr or Gmail is released in beta. But no — beta, as in second, rather than alpha male. Continue reading