AWPATT II: June 5-10 (Thoughts 5-10)

AWPATT Hub

5 On more than one occasion, I’ve attended or been attended by someone as one or the other of us tried on clothes. This ought to be a natural and comfortable thing for us to do (not saying we would both be in the dressing room). And we ought to give deference to each other’s opinions. There’s a sense in which professional attire isn’t necessarily the other’s prerogative to determine, but in terms of modesty and appeal, since we want to look good for each other and not fundamentally for anyone else, our significant other’s opinion on our casual day-to-day wear would logically seem to bear the most importance.

6 I’m not even moderately attracted to someone with a loose lifestyle. Somebody with a history of partying, getting drunk/high is unappealing because of the level of cognitive stupidity required to be that way.

7 I don’t understand what could be appealing to girls about guys who misbehave or speak rudely to them. Those who tolerate it or even act charmed by it, I personally find myself very suspicious of. It’s a turn-off.

8 I certainly have ethnic preferences in beauty, but no one could call someone racist for thinking some people are more attractive – TO THEM – What is racially supremacist is when you say “black/white/asian/etc women are the most beautiful women in the world.” Now you’re not just speaking your opinion about personal preference, you’re insulting everybody by jumping from specific observations to generalities, and by making truth claims when the vast majority of what you’re speaking about is outside of your personal experience.
                It’s neat when I notice attraction to a very different looking person, but chances are cultural differences will prevent me from being able to marry “outside.” It’s not about how you look, it’s about what traditions (a culture of constant boozing every weekend such as where I live is counted as a tradition because it’s culturally transmitted) inform your identity and aspirations. The fact that how people look happens to overlap with how they behave is mere coincidence, and value judgments on the behavior don’t translate to value judgments on people who look more like that person than like you.

                In case you didn’t realize I was getting at this, I’m saying that most white people are uninteresting to me for cultural reasons, because of how much the things they value clashes with what I value. The difference between racism and being thoughtful is whether there’s the element of prejudice. Pre-judging something before having the facts is always stupid. Making an educated judgment about whether you approve of a person’s behavior (and in context, find them attractive as a potential partner) is never wrong. It’s common sense. It’s what people do, in every other arena of life.

9 She ought to keep a Journal. it’s good for several reasons, most importantly to work out/develop your thoughts, to reason through things and know yourself, and to be better able to be known.

10 If she doesn’t appreciate my efforts to be thoughtful and romantic, I don’t know how we’ll work out. If she has a “meh” reaction to my poems posted on this blog, for example, that’s pretty much a red flag. It’s just logic. If you don’t “speak the same romantic language,” you’re not going to connect on a personal level and you won’t be able to demonstrate love to each other in a meaningful way.

~ Rak Chazak

A Woman Provokes A Thousand Thoughts

May 31 marked the one-year point after moving back home after graduating college with a B.A. in Biology. I mused recently about how long it may be until I would no longer be a “single Christian guy,” and since this date is suitably auspicious, I decided to count 1000 days from June 1. This gets fairly close to my 27^th birthday by the conclusion of the count (which will give me a year until I’m 28, the age I arbitrarily decided when I was 15 or 16 that I should reasonably be able to be married by) . But more than just counting the days to an arbitrary point at which I will let myself begin to stress out if I haven’t found a fiancée, I figured it would be very neat if I could take the time every night to try to generate a concise, unique thought inspired by my mental conception of my future wife, and to post these from time to time as a sort of mini-journal scribbling. Each thought will have something to do with this woman, either in remarking about what appeals or doesn’t appeal to me, or in thinking about how I can prepare myself to be a good partner, or what our relationship would be like. After all, devoting the time to think 1000 thoughts about how to have a good relationship with the right partner is bound to be beneficial; at the very least, it couldn’t hurt, and it will be here for her to read when we’re still making friends—a useful thing in my opinion, since it would help her decide if I’m the kind of guy she wants to marry.

Expect occasional bulk uploads of my AWPATTs; the dates covered will be in the post title.

~ Rak Chazak

AWPATTS:
1-4
5-10
11-19
20-23
24-30
31-40
41-49
50-82
83-88
89-96
97-108
109-200
201-204
205-230 - Special A-Z upload231-247 - marrying younger, and dating advice
248-262
263-320 - comments on approaching dating and evaluating potential partners


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Treatise: Married Women, Turn-offs, Turn-ons, and Plato’s Forms

                        I realized something right around the time when I was beginning to enjoy Christian music and spend time with other believers on campus. There were several couples who attended Campus Crusade (now known as just “Cru”), and I was happy to see that. Rather than focus on the obvious downside (“bummer, one less fish in the sea”), seeing a happy couple in a good relationship gave me encouragement because they, by their very existence, demonstrated that a committed relationship between young Christians could work. The obvious extrapolation of this observation is that if it works for them, it can work for me. Instead of being disappointed when I see a beautiful woman who’s “taken,” I draw enjoyment from their enjoyment by being glad that God is strengthening their bond and using them as a lamp for His glory, and look forward to the day when I can experience the same joy, personally. 

Yet, I want to make clear that what I like about a young Christian couple is the fact of their relationship itself and not an attraction to the woman in the relationship—getting these two confused can lead to catastrophe, and I think that inappropriate approaches to people in relationships, both by Christians and nonchristians, is one of the root causes for a lot of strange relationship problems that exist. I acknowledge that I initially recognize the woman as an attractive person. Sin is when that becomes lust—the desire to have HER for myself, which I’d like to think I don’t often do, but I acknowledge my imperfection and won’t dare to suppose that I’m less prone to that sort of thought than any other man. What I hold to be attractive about seeing her, happy, in a loving bond, is not her but the fact that she is happy, the fact that someone like her can be happy, and the fact that there can be such a loving bond that can generate such happiness. 

Let me briefly explain Plato’s forms. Plato used his brain of brains to wonder about things like definitions—what makes a thing the thing that it is? Is it arbitrary convention or is there an abstract concept that defines it? Let’s give an example: a chair. What makes a chair a chair? Is it that it has four legs, or three, or five? Is it its shape or its material that it’s made of, or its size? Why do we recognize every new chair that we see as a chair, and not as a completely new thing, since not all chairs are exactly alike? Plato would hold that there is a form called chair that defines “chair-ness,” and describes what it means to be a chair. Chairs are destructible and material but forms are eternally existent and immutable. Every chair possesses the form of “chair-ness,” and that’s what enables us to recognize it as a chair.  This is all a complicated way of getting to my point, which is this: I am attracted to the form of marriage. It is recognizable only in actual examples of marriage, but each actual marriage possesses some quality of “marriage-ness” that points to the form marriage, which is what I’m attracted to and desire. 

When I see a happy marriage between two Christians, it is not THEIR marriage that I desire. But there is something in their marriage that points to, that “reminds” me of some quality of the ideal of marriage, and it is THAT that I want. So when I see something in this ideal of marriage displayed in an actual marriage, it gives me hope because it shows that it’s not just an unreachable abstract idea, but a concrete reality that isn’t impossible to achieve—they did, and that means that you can have it too. That’s why I can be turned off to a particular woman upon realizing that she’s in a relationship (this is true. I would almost consider it a spiritual gift, but I suspect it’s just biology or psychology), yet turned on to/by something more abstract about her that isn’t HER, but a quality that she possesses that I yearn for in my own life. I don’t want their relationship. I want a relationship like theirs. And what that really means, in Christian theology, is that I want an earthly relationship with a woman that as closely mirrors the heavenly relationship, that God has with His Church, as possible.

~ Rak Chazak