Dear Dawson,
Thanks for contacting me. I actually wasn’t that surprised to hear from you, but I was perhaps a little surprised at how much detail you were able to provide. You have clearly done your homework, and I am glad you are working through these issues. You are clearly taking things seriously.
Dealing with the break up of a long term relationship is always hard, and this is particularly the case when you didn’t see it coming. You were shopping for a ring I gather, and she was apparently thinking that she could probably do better. That kind of thing is a punch in the gut, and there is no way around it.
Your questions are very good ones, and it is going to take me more than one letter to work through them. But I trust that you can put up with hearing from me from time to time—you have always been a most dutiful nephew.
So I want to work through this systematically. Think of this as a series of letters from an old guy on life between the sexes. Some of what I say will seem like it is straight out of the Bible, some of it will seem like it is common sense obvious, and some of it will seem to you to be wildly inappropriate and possibly illegal.
Judging from some of the books and websites you mentioned, I think it would be good to begin there. Your initial attraction to them was understandable, certainly, but there is real bitterness there, and there are profound spiritual hazards in that kind of bitterness. And the “manosphere” online is filled with a certain kind of red-pilled bitterness which, when it is coupled with evolutionary and materialistic assumptions, produces an odd mix of appalling selfishness and cynicism (and reductionism with regard to sex) coupled with common grace insights that you would never hear from an evangelical beta-preacher. So as you read such stuff you need to take that phrase caveat emptor, soak it in lighter fluid, and set it on fire.
The first thing to fix in your mind would be the doctrine of creation and fall. God made the sexes different on purpose. The basic outline of those differences is a design feature, and not a flaw. It is not the result of evolutionary adaptions, groping blindly in the dark. That is the creational foundation. The second factor to consider is sin. That creational set of initial differences has been marred by sin. In men, it has been marred in one direction, and in women it has been marred in another. But suppose yourself married to a godly woman, that godliness will not erase her essential femininity. And suppose you are walking closely with the Lord—that will not erase your masculinity.
Think of it this way. God created the man and the woman in order that they together might sing a duet, each with their respective part. Let us say that he is singing at one pitch and she is harmonizing with another. That is the creational difference. And when music harmonizes well, there are few things more glorious.
Enter sin. This means that he is now singing his part flat and she is singing her part sharp. When that starts happening, it sounds like nothing on earth. Nothing is worse than a sinful man and a sinful woman trying to get along. We tend to think that the problem is that they are singing something different (which is what harmony is), when the problem is that they are singing something different poorly. When you couple that with the fact that you are singing flat yourself, and playing the role of music critic at the same time, the predictable result is quarrels and gross misunderstandings.
So one of the solutions that people come up with is the makeshift solution of trying to sing in unison. They don’t know how to be distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine while staying on pitch, and so they pick one part, and insist that both sing that part.
In masculinist societies, that part has been the male one, and the women are required to just go along. In a feminist society, such as ours now is, it is the reverse. The basic framework of expectations is the feminine one, and the men are required to just go along. This is what I call life in girl world.
Everything is quite a jumble, and there are more than a few aspects of it that have everybody confused. Here is an illustration—the ubiquity of porn. This is a really serious problem, but the worst thing about the problem is that nobody appears to understand what the problem actually is. It is described for us as an example of the “male gaze,” or “toxic masculinity,” or the “objectification of women.” There are problems with all of that, of course, but what porn actually does is take male sexuality and hook it up to a heavy morphine drip.
A generation ago, when I got married, the average age for marriage was 22—right out of college. Now the average age, for men and women both, is in the late twenties. This is not because young men are refusing to get off the dime for some mysterious reason. Rather, this is a structural, systemic, societal problem, one that we have all together created for ourselves, and the borders of which we rigorously police.
I will finish with this observation. Your letter indicated that you thought a big part of the problem with your ex-girlfriend is that she had been “affected by feminism.” What I would like you to meditate on is something that goes in what you might think is a surprising direction. I think that it is just as likely that the break-up was because you have been affected by feminism.
Again, this is what I mean by life in girl world. The women have been affected by it, of course, but so have the men. Men are expected to behave in a certain way, and so are the women, but women have proven less adaptable to the dictates of this anti-creational nonsense. In other words, both sexes will repeat their egalitarian catechism answers, but the women continue to do what women have always wanted to do, which is to marry up. Women are hypergamous, and they continue to make their decisions on this basis, despite the egalitarian rhetoric.
Men have made more of an effort to fit in with the new egalitarian imperative , and then are surprised at the fact that the women don’t respond romantically to what the women appear to be demanding rhetorically. Right? You mentioned the guy that your ex is now dating, and the fact that he is in fact what she falsely accused you of being. You described him as being something of an alpha jerk, and she went for him after saying that you weren’t sensitive enough. What kind of sense does that make?
But it makes all the sense in the world, if you look at the world the way God made it, and stop listening to the lies that we tell ourselves about the brave, new world we are supposedly constructing. We are doing no such thing. We just simply growing increasingly befuddled about the old world—the one God ordained for us to live in. Because like it or not, that is the world we live in.
We must look at what God’s Word says, first, and then secondly look at how the world actually functions. Stop listening to what all the pundits and experts say, and look at what women do. Then look at what men do. And then take that to the Word.
Your uncle,
Douglas