In our postmodernist age of deconstructing everything, marriage and the family have come under relentless attack. All the Christian (in my case, Anglican) assumptions I made about relationships between men and women when I was a young man, have been swept under the carpet. The values that have glued not only Christian societies but ALL societies together from as far back as anyone can remember, have been challenged and for the most part rejected.
We live in an age of societal, racial and gender warfare as the very fabric of what makes a society function has been torn into shreds. These days a majority of young people seem to prefer being single, while being promiscuous, though axesuality seems to be arising now in response to even that. But that's not what I want to talk about. I have preached and taught about biblical marriage and gender rôles for the best part of four decades so I don't need to cover all of that. What interests me today is observing what the genders are discovering about themselves and each other having done away those values which we as believers hold so dear.
The latest social behaviour to fall apart is dating. And though I am not fan of the ritual of dating it did have certain practical advantages when both parties 'observed the rules' and in particular of chastity. What I want to share with you is a very astute observation by a female secular psychologist (whose name I do not know) who has been analysing all that's happened as a result of the 'woke revolution'. She is very honest and to the point. Again, I wish to repeat, this is not a biblical but a behavioural analysis. This is what she wrote:
"LADIES PLEASE TAKE NOTE!!!!! Men attend to women for two reasons, SEX, and LOVE, but in most cases, men do not marry for Sex or for Love, they marry for STABILITY. Let me explain.
"A man can love you and not marry you. A man can have sex with you for years without marrying you. But immediately he finds someone who brings stability in his life, he marries her.
"What I mean by 'stability' is peace of mind. I have seen some men who made this statement: 'I love this lady but I don't think I can spend the rest of my life with her.' Men are visionaries when they think about marriage, they do not think about wedding dresses, bridesmaids, anything that most ladies think is fanciful.
"They think whether this woman can build me a home: can she take care of my children and me? Can she give me peace of mind? Men don't like women who give them discomfort. This is why a man can stay with a woman for years and meet another in a month, then get married to her. It's the comfort of having peace of mind they want. Sex is a pleasure, love is an affection, but respect is stability."
I pointed out this difference between men and women many years ago. Our genders, while they have some overlapping expectations of one another, also have some very different ones indeed. Let me remind you of what Shaunti Feldhahn once said (you've probably seen this on the Marriage website):
"I was on a retreat with a bunch of singles, and the theme of the retreat was relationships, which as you can imagine was of great interest to a bunch of singles. The retreat speaker looked at this group of seventy people in this room, and he divided us in half.
"He put the men on one side and the women on the other side of the room. He said, 'I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you to choose between these two bad feelings. If you had to choose, would you rather feel alone and unloved in the world or would you rather feel inadequate and disrespected?'
"He turned to the men and he said, 'Okay men, who here would rather feel alone and unloved?' And every man raised his hand. You heard a giant gasp from the women's side of the room. The men would rather feel alone and unloved than . . . than to feel inadequate or disrespected.
"For women we most want to feel loved and cherished. This was like foreign land to us. We had no idea how they could choose this. He turned to the women's side of the room and he said, 'Okay women, who here would rather feel alone and unloved?' I think only three or four women raised their hand, and you heard the giant gasp from the men's side of the room. He said, 'Okay women, who here would rather feel inadequate and disrespected?' Almost every woman raised her hand.
"The highest need for men is to feel his wife's respect and trust and admiration and honour. So we can go, as women, overboard trying to show we love them, but if we don't also show that we respect them and maybe we criticise them in public or question their decisions all the time, they're going to feel disrespected and won't feel loved."
For Christians and Messianics, sex is the act of marriage. But for the world, sex has become a recreational activity that does not require a life long commitment of covenant marriage love with any sort of responsibility - it's why abortion or the slaughter of the unborn became the choice of libertines. Today it is (perversely) celebrated as an icon of 'free love' and by some even as a Molochian ritual to satanic forces.
But I disgress somewhat. My point is that carnal man, after he has had his fill of hedonistic sex, eventually (in most cases) wants to settle down in marriage because that is a desire the Creator has placed in him. Likewise Yahweh has placed the desire to raise a family in him...and in the women too. He has the need for the stability that respect alone brings as she has the need for love. At some point most men will want to cease 'free-range sex' and settle down, limiting that activity to marriage as Elohim (God) intended (because sex is, in His eyes, the 'act of marriage' - everything else is fornication and adultery which He, and true family men, hate).
I'll not get into why's and wherefore's as to what all that is. My only point in raising this matter is to once again point out what men and women most need and why those needs are different from one another. Most woke women think that all men want is sex (when it's primarily respect, peace and stability they want), most (though they are declining in number as sin multiples everywhere) men think women are willing to meet them half way in giving-and-taking when the reality is society is currently gripped by a radical feminist mentality which wants men to be their slaves in retribution for the perceived injustices of evil 'patriarchy'...or something similar to that. That's why secular men, particularly in America, are dropping out of the dating scene altogether, leaving women high and dry because now men are expecting...and demanding of them...something in return.
If you'd like to know more about what's happening in Western society, then I highly recommend the book by Esther Vilar entitled, The Manipulated Man (though please, because the writer is secular, read it in conjunction with a good Christian commentary such as may be found on the YouTube channel, Far From Eden). It will open your eyes.
