What has to be done

Now, this is a poster child for a child of divorce. Ronetta Alexander managed to run track, get a doctorate in pharmacology, and raise her teenage sister. While "Alexander's friends marvel at her maturity and self-reliance," Ronetta told The State newspaper, "I just thought, it's life. To me, it's life."

It's 10pm. Do you know where your mom is?

From an article for parents on dating after divorce:

The cell-phone calls would start a couple hours after she left. “Mom, it’s 10 o’clock, when are you coming home?” And later, “Mom, where are you now, Mom?”

When Anita Garvey started dating a couple years after her divorce, her teen daughters said they were happy for her, but even so, it wasn’t easy on the kids – or Garvey.

“It was almost like I was a teenager. It was like a role reversal,” said Garvey, who was divorced four years ago. It was perhaps made harder, she said, because she had been an at-home mom for most of her children’s lives, leaving the house to work only six years ago.

“They were used to having me 24/7,” said Garvey, of South Windsor, Conn. “Working was a little hard for them to digest, and then divorce was hard for them, and then when I started dating, I could sense they felt me pulling away.”

Read the whole story here.

When parents date

Do you have a story (good or bad) about one of your parents dating either after a divorce or after being widowed? If so, I'd like to hear from you. Use the email link under "View my complete profile" in the "About Me" section of the sidebar to share your story. I'm looking for stories as well as your advice for parents who are dating again.

Marriage-affirming words

Joni Eareckson Tada shared some nuggets of encouragement from her marriage to Ken Tada while speaking with Nancy Leigh DeMoss a few weeks ago. The transcript is well worth reading.

Joni talks about her and Ken's humorous first date, which was a good test of how he'd handle the day to day challenges of marriage to a quadriplegic. She talks about their rocky first year of marriage, and how she sought the Lord for help. And she talks about how she continues to encourage and support her husband.

If you need some encouragement in your marriage or in your singleness, go read this interview.

Marketing divorce

From my friend and co-blogger Holly at The Point:

"Life's short. Get a divorce." That's the tagline being used by a Chicago law firm to promote their divorce "services." The huge billboard, which hangs in Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood, features two scantily clad bodies. It screams sex. The law firm is defending the "cutting edge" ad. Divorce attorney Corri Fetman audaciously says, "If you're unhappy, that life is too short to continue in an unhappy marriage, those images provide hope."

Follow the link in Holly's post, if you dare, to the Fox News video story on this tasteless ad and you'll see the billboard: a catchy tagline and contact info for the law firm, flanked by the scantily clad torsos of a woman on the left and a man on the right.

OK, so the real message here seems to be that life is too short to be with a dumpy loser like the one you're holding hands with as you stroll down the street and see the billboard, and that if you would just get a divorce, you could hook up with a model-licous hunk or babe like the ones pasted overhead. Really? Come on!

This ad and the notion behind it reminded me of an old article at Boundless. In "Brother, You're Like a Six," Scott Croft lamented a similar fantasy that plays out among the unmarried crowd:

I once counseled a Christian brother in his dating relationship with a great woman. She was godly, caring, and bright. She was attractive, but not a supermodel. For weeks I listened to this brother agonize over his refusal to commit and propose to this woman. He said they were able to talk well about a lot of things, but there were a few topics he was interested in that she couldn't really engage with, and sometimes the conversation "dragged."

He also said that, while he found her basically attractive, there was one feature of hers that he "just pictured differently" on the woman he would marry. I would ask about her godliness and character and faith, and he said all those things were stellar (and he was right). Finally, he said, "I guess I'm looking for a 'ten'."

I could hold back no longer. Without really thinking, I responded, "You're looking for a 'ten'? But, brother, look at yourself. You're like a 'six.' If you ever find the woman you're looking for, and she has your attitude, what makes you think she would have you?"

Exactly. This law firm is trying to sell the ridiculous notion that all of us ordinary Joe's and Jane's deserve better, that we deserve to be with the hottest thing around. Because life would be so much better if we were arm in arm with someone better looking. Well, maybe for the first five minutes, until the person you're arm in arm with realizes that they deserve someone better looking than you.

And where in all of this do we find character, honesty, kindness, depth, compassion, love? Those are the things life is too short to be without; those are the things we can all display, with a little work and discipline, and the things we should hope and pray for in a spouse.

More on The Thrill of the Chaste

I posted another review of Dawn Eden's book on The Point. Check it out.

Sex and the single child of divorce

I got an advance copy of Dawn Eden's soon-to-be-released book, The Thrill of the Chaste. As one of my friends put it, chastity isn't my idea of a thrill. But Dawn's book is great. Really. I've read a lot of "wait for marriage" books in my years as a single Christian, and many of them have merit, but many are also pretty sappy and just a tad naive. Which is fine, I guess, if you grew up in the "Christian bubble," as another friend puts it. Dawn's book, however, joins Lauren Winner's Real Sex as a counterpart to the buttoned-up philosophy that most Christian books on this topic previously adopted. Bandying about Sex & the City and other pop culture icons, Dawn is honest about her own struggles to live chastely. She's encouraging, biblical, and fun to read.

Turns out Dawn is also a child of divorce. Her mom and dad split when she was five. Like many parents of that era, Dawn's believed that if they split nicely no one would get hurt. We know better now. She talks about how her parents' negativity about each other made her cynical at an early age and how she learned that her dad was mostly interested in what she did, not who she was (because he wasn't around enough to know who she was). Watching her mom struggle alone for many years, Dawn learned that "a woman can be highly intelligent and beautiful, and yet have a tremendously difficult time meeting a responsible, gentlemanly man who wishes to be married for life." (And I thought it was just me...) As her mom, whom she loved and admired, dated a string of nice but noncommittal men, Dawn "wondered if there were any men capable of seeing and appreciating inner beauty." She explores how her relationships with her parents affected her view of sex and marriage and how they affected her relationships with men. Near thirty, she realized she was unconciously sabotaging relationships, certain her boyfriends would abandon her the way her father had and determined to beat them to the punch. Dawn acknowledges that children of divorce can blame mom and dad pretty easily for the problems we deal with in life, and she urges us not to do it. Her own healing began when her relationships with her parents were healed, particularly the one with her father. She winds up by encouraging us to learn from our parents' mistakes, to realize that they tried to look out for us, to recognize that they're human, and to forgive them, "because they're not getting any younger, and neither are you. Because God says so. And...because every effort you make to forgive your parents will bring you healing and strength for the journey ahead."

The Virtuous Life

There’s enough good on Boundless to keep me going back to read, but enough just plain wrong to infuriate me. In a recent article, Candice Watters wrote of the benefits of living at home: “If you live on your own, your modesty and sense of propriety may protect you. But in the face of temptation, that's all you have.”

These are all you ever have. When Paul exhorts believers to put on the full armor of God, he lists the breastplate of righteousness, a protective covering I think we can rightly assume to include such things as modesty and propriety. In one of my favorite movies, Sleeping Beauty, the young prince is given a shield of virtue, a sure and powerful defensive weapon against evil.

Regardless of our living situation, and regardless of our marital status, you and I must make a choice for virtue, for truth, for chastity. This is not ultimately a choice for marriage; it is a choice for God. Protecting your chastity isn’t about snaring a mate who requires a virgin, nor is it about rewarding your virgin newlywed sweetheart with your own unbesmirched virtue. It is about obedience. It’s always about obedience.

In a follow up to this article, Candice counsels a young woman that if she doesn’t meet the qualifications for lifelong celibacy then God of course intends for her to be married. There’s a logical fallacy here, though, and it’s a critical one to the issue of virtue and obedience. The idea being touted is that if you cannot live without sex God will give you a get out of sin free card in the form of a spouse. Whew! Dodged that one. But what about those who can’t imagine living the rest of their lives having sex with only one person? Do they get a free polygamy pass? The fact is, God has set boundaries for us. Some of us will be married and will need to live virtuously in our married state; the consequences of not doing so are often divorce and all the heartache and regret that accompany such the dissolution of a sacred bond. Some of us will remain single forever and will need to live virtuously in our unmarried state; this may be a joy or it may be a thorn in the flesh. But in either case, obedience is the only option, and it is possible for all of us. You may question whether God has called you to marriage, but you can be sure God has called you to be holy (1 Peter 1:15-16).

To search or not to search

From an article that offers hope to the divorced: “I think it’s usually not to your advantage to be looking for someone to marry, because if you can’t learn to be OK by yourself and with friends and learn to enjoy your job and enjoy living by yourself, it’s going to be very hard for you to find satisfaction and happiness in a relationship.”

Single, parenting, and dating

Here's a good article by a single dad on dating with kids. "What I've learned in 11 years of being a single parent is that parents often think they're ready to date, and they can't figure out why their kids aren't jumping onto the bandwagon. ...As adults, it's hard to put our hormones on hold, but sometimes we have to because our children need us."

Thoughts from Lauren Winner

I finished reading Lauren Winner's Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity last night. This is much more heavy theology than her previous books, bringing a very weighty perspective to a topic that typically gets a quick and light treatment. Here are some quotes pertinent to our discussion...

...on marriage:

[in years gone by] "there was a togetherness born not merely of affection but of mutual work. It didn't really matter if you liked your husband on a given Tuesday. You were stuck working with him all day anyhow. Your togetherness, your relationship didn't rely on the caprice of your feelings. You were bound together, primarily, by a common undertaking--making your productive household run." (This reminds me of Leslie Leyland Fields' autobiography Surviving the Island of Grace.)

"No matter how clearly we see ourselves and our fiances, marriage will prove difficult. We will both change. We will argue, and feel broken, and wonder why we ever married in the first place--and it is God who will sustain us in those spells."

...on singles living chastely:

"...the unmarried Christian who practices chastity refrains from sex in order to remember that God desires your person, your body, more than any man or woman ever will."

[quoting John A.T. Robinson on the importance of the body] "It is from the body of sin and death that we are delivered; it is through the body of Christ on the Cross that we are saved; it is into His body the Church that we are incorporated; it is by His body in the Eucharist that the community is sustained; it is in our body that its new life is to be manifested; it is to a resurrection of this body to the likeness of His glorious body that we are destined."

"In baptism, you have become Christ's Body, and it is Christ's Body that must give you permission to join His Body to another body."

...and on both chastity and fidelity:

"This is how sin works: it whispers to us about the goodness of something not good."

I'd turn them into newts if I could

My friends need to stage an intervention with me. I need someone to set the parental controls of my computers to not allow me to view boundless.org. Every few weeks, they post another single-is-sin article and I start foaming at the mouth. I just turned down the chance to attend a reunion of a group of people I used to be involved with, a singles' group of sorts at a church. The odd thing about this group was that the couple who led it were in the single-is-sin camp. I'm still trying to figure out why they thought they were called to minister to singles. Their passions might have been put to better use in matchmaking. I wouldn't mind seeing some of my old friends, but I just can't shake the feeling that I would hear a little 'tsk-tsk, there's one of our failures' as I entered the room.

Now, this is far from the first article Boundless has posted on this topic. But as I read this article today, I literally gasped. I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from that classic Cinderella-hooker movie Pretty Woman. Julia Roberts goes to the powder room to floss and Richard Gere barges in thinking she's doing drugs. He says, "I'm sorry. It's just, well, not many people surprise me anymore." Roberts' character responds with, "Yeah? Well, you're lucky; most of them shock the hell out of me." I guess I should be more blase about this, but I couldn't help being shocked. Here's what got me:

"...singles are often reduced to extolling singleness, much like a witch having the grace to drown to prove innocence.”

I'm sorry, did you just call me a witch? Are you KIDDING ME???

I would have stayed mad if the author hadn't made such a laughable gaff just a few paragraphs later. Right after calling singles "wayward and askew," the author supports her premise with a small, out of context quote by a distinguished, respected, learned Christian author: C.S. Lewis. Who [ahem] I can't help but point out, remained a bachelor until the ripe old age of 58. The scalliwag!

The author didn't just need a good editor on this piece (who should have pointed out the hypocritcal use of a Lewis quote); she needed a good theology teacher. There is nothing in scripture that says being single is a sin. If there were, we'd have to go back to the theology drawing board, because our gentle, sinless Savior was Himself a singleton. He didn't preach any sermons on the virtues of marriage or scold any of His single followers. In fact, truth be told He just doesn't really talk about it at all, one way or the other. It seems to be pretty much a non-issue.

Of course, one of the favorite passages of the single-is-sin crowd is that old Garden of Eden command to "be fruitful and multiply." The problem with extrapolating that into single-is-sin is that the command is never repeated in the New Testament under the new covenant of grace, and bearing fruit is defined in a New Testament sense as either producing good works or evangelizing and discipling. It's a classic case of unfolding revelation and layers of meaning. The New Testament certainly doesn't prohibit marrying, and in fact there is a specific injunction not to prohibit people from marrying. But neither does it prohibit singleness.

The author of the Boundless article relies mostly on historical precedent to support her thesis. If the Puritans did it, it must be okay. The Puritans are in great vogue now in evangelical circles, and indeed there is much we can learn from their earnest attempts to follow God. But they were not without their flaws; they were, after all, human. The trouble isn't, as the author of the Boundless article wrote, that we somehow believe we know better than the generations before us; the trouble is that we too often let cultural norms define our idea of spirituality rather than the other way around.

The best book I've ever read on the topic of singleness is written by my dear friend Lori Smith. Lori's book, to this day, remains one of the few (if not the only) books for singles that looks at the topic from a biblical perspective. Rather than lamenting her unmarried state, dishing advice for how to catch a man, or coming up with pithy cute "you go girl" cheerleading sessions, Lori pulled out the Book and looked to see what the One who created us has to say about not being married. I'm tempted to mail a carton full of her books to Boundless and ask them to distribute them to all their contributing writers.

Lori did for singleness what I hope to do for being a child of divorce: look at the topic from God's perspective. I can't claim to know the mind of God, but I can read and share with you the things He revealed for all times in Scripture. Together we can grow closer to Him and become the women and men He wants us to be. Warts and all.

“Are you scared to get married? Honestly?”

This question came from a male friend who read my newly-minted blog this morning. His folks divorced just a few years ago and rocked his world. Yet another reminder that there isn’t a good time, as far as kids are concerned, for mom and dad to split up.

But back to the question. Am I scared to get married? Honestly? And the answer is, yeah, a little. But I think it’s a healthy fear. Let me explain. I think an analogy will help.

I grew up around water. If there was a place to swim within 100 miles of wherever we lived, we found it. We lived in an apartment complex for two summers and had a pool right outside our back door, but usually our swimming holes were of the old-fashioned variety. The kind that are murky and full of fish. I love to swim and learned to do so at a young age. My brothers learned even younger. By the time they were born, we lived in New Jersey, near my grandparents who owned a small summer cottage on a lake. My kid brothers were bobbing on the waves with the rest of us when they could barely walk.

We didn’t just learn to swim though. We learned to respect the water. We were lectured on the necessity of checking out unfamiliar areas carefully before jumping or diving into the water. We heard Joni Eareckson’s story repeatedly. We were lectured on the dangers of drinking alcohol around water long before any of us had our first drink. During the few winters that were cold enough to freeze the lake, we got to ice skate and ice fish—and we heard lectures about not walking on cracked ice or ice bubbles, and what to do if someone fell through the ice.

We loved the water. We spent hours swimming, floating, and boating. We dove with abandon off my grandparents’ dock, having long ago located all the below surface dangers. But even next door, we would only dive off the neighbors’ dock when cousins or siblings were standing on the rocks to clearly mark them. We were well aware of the serious danger that water could be to anyone who didn’t respect it and treated it cavalierly, or who were so afraid of it that they never learned to swim.

And that’s how I feel about marriage. I would love to experience it, to swim and float in the pure delight of a husband’s love, to discover what lies beneath the murky depths of a man’s mind, even sometimes to wrinkle my nose in surprised disgust at the toe-grabbing seaweed of a man’s less refined habits.

But I know marriage is not a thing to be entered into lightly. It is, after all, a solemn vow and commitment before God, something never to be entered into lightly. It is also something that requires work. I didn’t learn to swim in a day, and even after I learned, there was a process of becoming more proficient and then of learning new strokes. And there were times of stretching—feeling confident enough to swim out to the float; being in awe of grandpa who swam across the whole lake; taking aquatic aerobics in college, which turned out to be a grueling class of swimming laps.

A friend of mine got some concerned looks when she was seen with a copy of a book subtitled "Building an Affair-Proof Marriage." Was her marriage in trouble? No, but she knows that danger always lurks (1 Peter 5:8) and she was taking no chance of it catching her unaware. I think she's a wise woman.

I’m sure I still carry around some dreamy illusions of marriage, but I also feel that I have a pretty healthy respect for the amount of vigilance, hard work, perseverance, and sheer determination that make possible those times when you can spread your arms wide, float gently on the waves, and soak up the sun.

Boundless, a web site affiliated with Focus on the Family, ran an article by Deborah Crittenden about the cost of delaying marriage. They got a lot of flak, but are standing by the article. That's fine, but I wish they'd been a little more gracious in their defense of an article that clearly offended a lot of people. Ms. Crittenden's world is very different than mine. None of my friends sit around and proclaim our "fierce independence." We'd all welcome marriage. As one friend said, "If singleness is a sin, I'd be happy to repent!"

In defense of Ms. Crittenden, her article contains a stark fact. The percentage of women in their 20s who are married dropped significantly between 1965 and 1995. The problem is that Ms. Crittenden makes an assumption about why this happened. Her own life experience leads her to conclude that today's single women consciously delayed marriage in favor of a lifestyle that includes higher education, independence, and a successful career track. It's nice anecdotal evidence, perhaps, but let's consider the societal shifts that occured in that same 30 year time frame.

The single 20-something women of 1995 are the offspring of those married 20-something gals of 1965. They are also members of Generation X, or as some have started calling it, GenerationEx; statistically, 50% of those 1965 marriages ended in divorce. This trend has had profound effects on today's young men and women. Elizabeth Marquardt and Judith Wallerstein have each thoroughly studied and extensively written on these effects.

Another social shift worth noting is the extreme mobility of today's culture. Both sets of my natural grandparents grew up in the same town. Their families knew each other. On my dad's side, my grandparents met in grade school and had years of interaction before wedding vows were exchanged. On my mom's side, my grandpa's sister was a good friend of my grandma; that's how they met. But things have changed. We're on the go. Suitors today are rarely lifelong family friends or gradeschool companions.

So what does this mean? I think for starters it means that we need to have more compassion and less judgment. I think it's also time for the Church to welcome singles. Few churches really do that, you know. We need to reach out to the singles in our midst and embrace them as friends. You might be surprised at the insight some of them have into contentment, obedience, and even marriage. And, of course, I think we all need to understand better how the culture of divorce has affected today's young adults.