relationships

So guys like girls…

Danny Webster 3 Comments

I’ve discovered something remarkable in the course of writing about relationships. It has sparked a lot of interest and a lot of conversations, I’ve found myself in the absurd position of offering counsel and hearing stories that range from the comic to the heart warming. I’ve heard from guys who have no idea what they should do and girls who know exactly what the guys should do.

But I’ve learnt one immutable fact, guys like girls and girls like guys.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it, that this is what I’ve learnt? Sounds like I’ve been on another planet for the past 27 years. Except we often think that we are the exception. That we are experiencing something that no one else is. So when we hear from others that they face the same challenges and feel the same, it wakes us up that something is going on.

And I have come to two conclusions. The first I’ve already mentioned, and that is that this is a big issue, it gets people thinking and talking, and considering, it evokes lively emotions and painful decisions.

The second is that we have to get talking about it. I speak only for my situation, in a church of 500-600 people, most of whom are young and single. And in that situation I’ve taken a bit of a straw poll. I’ve inquired as to people’s dating experience, who they’ve asked out, who has asked them out. And I’ve tested a little hypothesis, and I didn’t expect to get as much agreement as I did.

The hypothesis is this, speaking of the single people in my church, most of them at most times are interested in someone of the opposite sex. And usually the person they are interested in is likely to be someone who they spend time around. So take any group of people from the church and it is to be expected that there are a lot of emotions lingering in the ether. Some of these feelings will be tentative, others will be unrequited, occasionally they will be obviously reciprocated. But all the time they will affect the group.

Except that’s not how we act. We act as though we are all just friends, and we push the romantic attraction below the surface, sometimes to preserve our own frail facade, sometimes to steer clear of awkwardness, but I think most of the time because we are happy living in the now. We are happy with what we have got, and we want to make the most of it. In a crowd of singles we share a common bond, an unspoken rebellion against the cultural norm.

It’s never that intentional, most would say they are looking for a partner, it’s just they don’t say much about it. It exists as a backdrop to our community and it affects it in two parallel ways, it inhibits the formation of strong non-romantic friendships and it stifles the open pursuit of romance. So back to my little straw poll, how much dating goes on, not much. It does take place and it usually happens quietly and discreetly in a most respectful way.

But go back to my premise, if most people like someone most of the time, and the people I surveyed had asked or been asked out between zero and three times. That leaves a lot of affection that goes unspoken.

I’ve also been asked for some solutions as I’ve written, the truth is I’m all out of those.

So let me offer one other consequence if we repress our feelings too much, we are living double lives.

Harsh? Yes.

But if we like someone and continue to act around them as though we are just friends we are deceiving them and deluding ourselves.

The art of availability

Danny Webster 1 Comment

Don Miller’s two posts on living a great love story has sparked quite a lot of debate across the internet. Maybe it’s because I’m new to this blogging malarkey, or because I’m reading people who write on the topic, but everyone seems to be talking about it. Everywhere I turn I see another post about dating, singleness, knowing whether he/she is the one. This is a topic that interests people, and one where people have very different views. It was these posts that got me going, and its taken a while to properly engage with the issues raised. If you haven’t read the earlier posts, please take a moment to, I started off with The church kissed dating goodbye, then Why guys don’t ask girls out, and yesterday posted When friendship hurts. This is a long post, I am sorry about that, I’ve included some pictures. Tomorrow comes the theology.

As in all things context matters, and by taking account of this hopefully we can clear away some of the debris and make headway through the midst of misunderstood machinations of the heart. I write in my situation, and that it is probably different to yours. I don’t think there are many things I could say which would apply in every circumstance. I live in London, I am 27 and I am single. I go to a church where most of the congregation are of a similar age, living and working in central London and neither married nor in a relationship. I think that while the problem is found all over it is particularly acute here, one friend from the other side of the world said there were few single people over 25 in her church.

As I read through Don Miller’s posts I was slightly uncomfortable with his approach. Perhaps I was a bit circumspect because an earlier post of his on dating a few months back had sparked widespread ridicule when I parroted the advice which he in turn had taken from Henry McCloud. Don Miller is a great author and out of respect I felt it appropriate to wear my Blue Like Jazz t-shirt as I write what I intend as a gentle critique.

When I first read his posts I skipped over the comments. Then I picked up from other blogs and tweets that a sense of growing outrage was spreading, in particular over his depiction of women, and use of the label ‘slutty’. I then took time to read through the lengthy thread of response and saw repeated comments venting fury and claiming betrayal. It is worth remembering that this wasn’t a hostile audience, in most cases people cited the positive impact his books had on their lives, before putting the knife in.

So where did he go wrong? And what do we do when we characterise relationships in a way that makes them harder and not easier?

I think Don Miller made two mistakes, firstly he painted a picture of women who have less than perfect pasts using crude and derogatory language. For an author who has a reputation for using words and phrases and sentences on pages to winsomely communicate important ideas, this was a surprise. It also conveyed a sense that girls who had perhaps gone through a more promiscuous period were some how tarnished. The redemptive options were underplayed, perhaps to emphasise his point and encourage more chaste behaviour.

But the second mistake he made is the one I want to focus on. He proposed a model that is idealised, even romanticised, and therefore hard to translate to reality. And when it can’t be transferred, is open to abuse, because, dare we need reminding, we all get most things wrong most of the time.

It’s not just Don Miller that thinks like this. I do, you do, we all do. We all have hopes and dreams that are infused by Hollywood on how we should fall in love. Don Miller even points this out in his advice to girls, he explicitly tells them not to fall for the romantic version of life. And I think this is crucial. Because life and love is a lot more than infatuation. It is not about the swooning over someone who has just taken your breath away. It is about car maintenance, mortgages, and projectile vomiting.

Love is hard, and I should know, I’ve spent enough energy avoiding it. We should not sanitise it or idealise it.

And the way the church often does this is by promoting the guy as the conquering hero: that women need men to lead them into a love story.

This places unrealistic expectations on guys, and too easily disenfranchises girls.

If I were to caricature the gender roles in this ideal type relationship, the guy pursues and the girl makes herself available. I’ve asked a couple of girls what it means to make themselves available and they weren’t sure. And this was reassuring to hear because I certainly wouldn’t have been able to spot a girl ‘making herself available’, at least not in the restrained Christian sub-culture.

There is the intention to not make the girl’s role entirely passive, but availability seems a rather nebulas concept which when contrasted with pursuit as the male preserve looks like a rather limited option.

Here are a couple of thoughts for what it might mean for a girl to make herself available:

  1. Don’t hang out too much with guys you are not interested in. If they like you they will think it’s reciprocated, and for other guys who might like you it will look like you’re taken (see yesterday’s post).
  2. Tell them 

I could have thought up a whole schema of other signals a girl could send, and how much they should flirt, what they should wear, how often they should sit next to the guy in church. But really, most of that just magnifies the confusion. When I notice something in a girl’s actions I clock that it might mean she is interested, but have no static reference point to measure it against. And when I sought some elucidation from a girl on this, she shrugged and suggested it was mostly intuition.

And of course it is, because I am not the same as someone else. I communicate in different ways to different people, my words, actions, even my presence varies from person to person, from guys to girls, and from girls I am interested in to those I am not. But it’s not an easy distinction to make. So I think we need a remarkable degree of honesty and integrity, and I know that I am a hypocrite I write these words because so rarely have I been honest about how I feel.

The whole notion of pursuit conjures up an image of a guy catching a girl who is playing hard to get, or winning over her heart despite her initial intentions. I know of couples who started out like this, where the guy liked the girl, and she did not, I recall hideous being the moniker used in one case. But he persisted, I thought he just wasn’t getting the hint, but in the end she turned around and they are now husband and wife. But I think this is rare, and if guys get too much encouragement to pursue it can make it hard for girls who have bad experiences of aggressive and abusive relationships.

For many couples the opening stage is nuanced and confused and often more than a little bit messy. So being open about how you feel, rather than waiting for the other person to initiate something is really important.

I’m not a particularly perceptive person. I don’t always realise what’s going on around me, I’m often the last to notice that a couple are together. So it’s useful to have friends and to use them. They will see things you don’t, even the most perceptive people often have a blind spot. If you are interested in someone you are likely to interpret their actions in a certain way, if you’re an optimist everything re-enforces the idea that they like you back, if you are glass half empty type then they could be throwing themselves at you and you would still be convinced that they are just being polite.

A lot of this comes down to us caring too much what other people think of us. We are reluctant to put ourselves on the line and run the risk of people, or a specific person, seeing us as we really are.

Post script: In the comments of an earlier post it was pointed out that guys do ask girls out, often discreetly, and they deserve credit for doing so. Yes they do.

When friendship hurts

Danny Webster 4 Comments

At the end of my last post I mentioned that fear of losing friendship was a major reason why guys don’t ask girls out. In fact I should be more specific, it is often why I haven’t asked girls out. And that makes this a difficult piece to write, because when I talk generally I am really doing little more than publicise my introspection.

But I don’t think I’m alone, so hopefully this will be helpful. I’m also going to include some different points of view which effectively turn the issue on its head.

For me friendships with girls have got in the way in two different ways. Firstly, there have been girls who I am friends with who I fancy (a dreadful term but it does the job).

The fear here is that I might endanger our friendship either by broaching the subject and finding it not reciprocated, or by any ensuing relationship going sour.

At most points in my life I have had better relationships with girls than guys. At times I have found myself interested in a girl that strolls into my life unattached, but invariably exits stage right on the arm of another.

My attractions have always remained muted, leaving me to wonder whether I missed an opportunity to grasp everlasting happiness. I rationalise these doubts away, thinking that as in hindsight nothing came of these proto-relationships I was better off not pursuing them, and saving myself the inevitable awkwardness that would have ensured had I broached the subject and they declined as they were destined to do in my curiously pessimistic mental role play. Really, I’m just a wimp.

The second scenario is where I am not interested in more than friendship, and perhaps as a result easily slip into an emotional dependency. A friend put it something like this: guys are such good friends with girls that they don’t feel the need for a girlfriend. I’m not sure I would ever put it quite as starkly as that, but I suspect at least subconsciously that I receive a dose of affirmation and attention from girls that cause me to question my need for anything more. Dependency can be toxic, and while a lot of this happens subconsciously I think it is fair to acknowledge female friend dependency.

There’s a particular issue here for Christians who are assiduously encouraged to preserve sex for marriage. This means that they, we, I, have dismissed physical attraction and temptation as off limits. The mindset is often that ‘I shouldn’t be having these feelings’. It becomes hard in this scenario to differentiate between a close female friend, and a girl you like because the physical attraction is thought of as less than pure and therefore removed from the equation.

Rarely, if ever, have I had a sole female friend who becomes in effect a pseudo girlfriend, because I have many female friends, which has a good and a bad side. Good: I don’t want to be inappropriately close to just one girl. Bad: I like to preserve my friendships with multiple girls.

This is slightly absurd, while I am single I excuse emotional closeness with different girls but when you are in a relationship with one this is not sustainable. I know deep down that this is an inevitable, essential and worthy sacrifice, but I still resist.

I’ve talked to a few girls about this to see if it is the same the other way round. And I don’t think it is quite the same, girls are emotionally open with each other in a way that guys aren’t. I also think that guys are more likely to be ignorant of any faux relationship that develops in a friendship.

One girl I spoke to made a lot of just how manipulative girls can be, ‘they take craziness to a whole different level’. She only claimed to be speaking for herself but the point was that girls will go to extraordinary lengths if they are interested in a guy.

Guys can also be premeditated in trying to show their attraction in pretty minute ways, I know that I have been. But at the risk of confirming the stereotype of guys, the lengths that girls go to may not necessarily be picked up with the same forensic scrutiny with which they were planned.

I made a big deal in an earlier post that guys are not all the same and neither are girls. So all I’ve said should come with a health warning – it might be entirely irrelevant to you.

I was chatting with a guy yesterday about female friends and his experience struck a very different chord to mine. His concern was that even within a church overflowing with single ladies he found it hard to develop friendships with them, and as a result struggled to know whether there might be any relationship in the offing.

I’ll wrap this up by circling in on something I said before, the disassociation of physical affection from relationships outside marriage. By presenting marriage as something other, and that as the sole place for physical intimacy, the line between close male and female friends and a ‘relationship’ is too easily blurred.

Why guys don’t ask girls out

Danny Webster 18 Comments

Yesterday I wrote my first proper blog, and I got more feedback from it than I expected. The topic seems to have scratched where people itch.

I’ve had tweets, emails and comments from people I would not have expected, as well as the strange transition when some one talks to me in person about what I wrote. (Note to self: the blog is public.)

So my tentative conclusion is that this classifies as a Big Issue. But this blog is not going to be all about relationships, and I am certainly not the person to write it even if it was. I’m going to offer some tentative thoughts in a moment to spring wide the debate, and there are at least two more posts on the topic coming soon (‘idealised notion of romance’, and ‘where does male headship fit into all this’). However, I will also be posting on a few other topics in between, and trying to explain what ‘broken cameras and gustav klimt’ means.

I am rather unqualified to pontificate on this topic. Sure, I talk to plenty of people about relationships. I talk to plenty of girls about them. But the conversation goes one of two ways, either talking about their love life, or them telling me to man up and ask girls out. On one occasion a girl who I didn’t know that well asked me quite out of the blue whether I was asking girls out. I prevaricated, waffled and probably just about got around to saying no.

I’m not offering any answers below, I’d welcome you thoughts, ideas and suggestions about how to deal with it.

Fear.

That’s why. That’s why guys in church don’t ask girls out. And this works itself out in multiple ways:

  1. Fear of commitment. This is the obvious one but I don’t think that major. There are certainly guys who like to play the field and don’t want to settle down, but the bigger impact of this is that it leads to…
  1. Fear of uncommitment (yep I made that word up). Guys shy away from asking girls out because they don’t want to be seen as frivolous, they don’t want to be seen as lacking commitment. The logic goes: if I ask someone out, she’ll tell her friends and then if I ever want to ask one of those out they’ll know that I’d already asked one of her friends out, and she will then think that I don’t think she’s the one. Yes, guys do think like this. And they don’t want to be seen as playing the field.
    This is where the Joshua Harris school of thought has had a damaging impact. Guys have been encouraged to be cautious and wait until they ‘know’.
  1. Fear of rejection. This is pretty obvious. Guys don’t want to be turned down so they don’t ask. There may be a whole host of guys out there who ask girls on dates left right and centre and not caring one iota what the reaction is. I know they exist but I think they’re a pretty rare breed. And those who do? Well my hunch is that they do care, I don’t want to go all psychobabble but rejection hurts, the more it happens the more you might get used to it, but the hurt is still there, a scab has just grown over it.
    I said I wasn’t giving answers, here’s something that’s not the answer: girls saying yes to dates regardless – that’s called leading a guy on.
  1. Fear of getting it wrong. Guys are afraid that if they ask a girl out they will screw it up. I don’t mean the relationship, I mean the act of asking a girl out. And the potential embarrasment that might ensue, which conveniently leads me to…
  1. Fear of losing friends. In the church I think this one is the silent killer of romance. Gaggles of guys and girls who are friends but nothing more. A wide tundra stretches between friendship and romance that gets larger by the day. A few years ago I dubbed this ‘female friend dependency theory’, and that deserves a post of its own.

Can all of these be answered by asking men to man up? Or is there more of a problem at the root?

The Church Kissed Dating Goodbye

Danny Webster 12 Comments

This is not a post about dating, at least not really. It’s about me. It is about you. It’s about men and it is about women.

Twice in the past few weeks I have found myself in formal discussions about marriage, and being the only single person present I was turned to for the single person’s perspective. And here is the first problem: everyone is different.

Don Miller has written a couple of long posts giving advice for guys and girls on how to live a great love story. And following the comments on twitter led me to Ally Spott’s blog, and in particular a great guest post from Darrell Vesterfelt. It also took me further, delving into the hinterland of advice available for young (and those growing less young) Christians approaching relationships.

My first reaction is of quiet rebellion, resisting the broad generalisations in how guys and girls behave. I want to insist that I am not like that, and neither are many of the guys I know. I also want to reject the thinly veiled chauvinism that is often masqueraded as male headship. I also wanted to respond but had no outlet, so I started this blog.

One more piece of context before I kick off with some thoughts of my own. A couple of weeks ago the question of masculinity in the church got a whole lot of prominence on the interweb because some guy who leads a relatively large church as well as a baying legion of hipsters made a rather crass remark about effeminate worship leaders. #effemigate sparked a flurry of posts rejecting its bullying mentality. I also picked ‘Why Men Hate Going To Church’ by David Murrow off my sister’s bookshelf, and ploughed through it with exponentially mounting frustration.

I grew up in a church with lots of young people, and lots of young people who didn’t really date. So when Joshua Harris was at the height of his popularity his words didn’t really hit home. I also adopted a classic posture of British superiority – ‘well that might be how it is in the states, but here we’re much more civilised’. I now go to a church with hundreds of young adults in central London, most of whom (70% plus) are single, and by that I mean single, not just not married but not in relationships. So while the criticism of casual dating that was at it’s peak a few years back rang hollow the current meme of why Christians aren’t dating more hits home with a lot more force.

There’s quite a head of steam behind it at the moment, it is a conversation I have with remarkable frequency: why aren’t guys asking girls out?

Darrell’s post touches on the question of pursuit and initiation and the conversation goes on in the comments, settling around the idea that it is the man’s job to pursue but that shouldn’t stop the girl from initiating. I think the question resounding from the cheap seats is: what on earth does this look like? Initiating but not pursuing?

Pursuit is in danger of becoming the concept around which we define the male role in relationships. And the problem with that is it makes it like a quest, and it appeals to the rather tarnished idea of conquest. Me man, win woman.

John Eldridge, David Murrow and co have this idea of men lugging huge tree trunks up a mountain and making fire from a squirrel’s tail. And that’s the kind of masculinity I have the most affinity for. Except I also know girls that like adventure and the great outdoors, and believe it or not, I know guys who like to crochet.

I know effeminate men, I know strong women. We label characteristics with pejorative adjectives, strong women might be described as butch. It is less manly to be effeminate and less ladylike to be aggressive.

And this is where I think Mark Driscoll gets it wrong, we should affirm and validate people for who they are, not who we think they should be. I do not deny that men and women are different, but there are as many differences within each gender as between them. 

If we centre our understanding of masculinity and femininity on difference, and the idea of man as pursuer, provider and protector, there is an ensuing impact on how guys view girls. Even the language conveys meaning, to be a ‘guy’ is strong and compatible with being an adult. Whereas, ‘girl’ kind of runs out of steam, it pigeon holes women pre-marriage into a childlike state, a boy becomes a guy but a girl remains a girl. 

The corollary of man as adventurer, is too often to see woman as meek and mild. And it is this casually dismissive posture that makes me shudder. I think guys do need to man up, but this doesn’t mean that women are neutered.

Masculinity and femininity are not two mutually exclusive life forms, they are both found to some extent in everyone. How we talk about men and women in relationships should reflect this diversity and not try to expel it.

Maybe that’s a controversial enough statement to finish on…

I told you this wasn’t really about dating, but the next one will be: ‘In defence of guys not asking girls out’.